Does church attendance reduce crime? A simple causal argument could be made that church attendance affects people's moral judgements and therefore their behaviour, reducing crime. However, attempting to establish whether this is the case is going to be difficult empirically, because it isn't easy to conduct an experiment and people aren't randomly allocated to attend church.
This 2020 paper by Jonathan Moreno-Medina (Duke University) takes a slightly different approach. Moreno-Medina relies on the quasi-experimental variation in church attendance that arises because of the weather. Specifically, people are less likely to attend church when it rains. By looking at the extent to which it rains during the specific time window associated with church services (which Moreno-Medina sets as 9am-1pm on Sundays) and how that affects church attendance, Moreno-Medina has an instrument that he can use to extract the causal impact of church attendance on crime. The rain data comes from hourly observations by NOAA, and the county-level crime data comes from the Uniform Crime Reports, and both datasets cover the period from 1980 to 2016.
In a standard instrumental variables analysis, all of the data belongs to the same dataset and both the first stage and second stage regression models can be run jointly. However, that isn't the case for this paper, which is based on the more-rarely-used two-sample two-stage least squares method. Essentially, Moreno-Medina first runs a regression that predicts church attendance at the county level, based on precipitation at the time of church (PTC) and other control variables. The church attendance data comes from the American Time Use Survey, and Google's Popular Times. He then estimates the reduced form regression model for crime, with PTC as an explanatory variable (and including other control variables). The combination of the reduced form model and the first stage can be used to extract the causal effect of church attendance on crime (which I won't go into detail on here, but it is explained in the paper, as well as in econometrics textbooks such as Angrist and Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics, which I reviewed here). You might be concerned that PTC is correlated with precipitation at other times of the week. Moreno-Medina therefore controls for precipitation at other times as well.
In terms of the key results, he finds that:
...having one more Sunday with precipitation at the time of religious services increases substance-related and ‘white-collar’ yearly crimes by around 0.25%, but I find no effect on more serious offenses such as violent crimes (murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery) and property crimes. The implied effect of church attendance shows that an increase of 1% in the attendance rate would reduce drug-related crimes by 0.8%, alcohol-related crimes by 0.66% and white-collar crimes by 0.67%.
The headline results in terms of crime overall are mostly plausible. The effects on alcohol-related or drug-related crimes occur within a short time window, but the effects on white-collar crimes (fraud, forgery, etc.) occur with a lag. A lack of statistically significant effects on violent crimes is consistent with a mechanism where church affects crimes to a much weaker extent for violent crimes than for substance-related or white-collar crimes. Moreno-Medina isn't able to specifically identify the mechanisms by which church attendance reduces crime. However, interestingly:
I characterize the population of compliers (individuals who would not attend church because it precipitated at that time) along some observable characteristics. I find that compliers are much more likely to have at least some post-secondary education, and are more likely to be young adults and male. While precipitation decreases average attendance to church, I show that it also increases the probability of engaging in leisure activities at home, but has no effect on other potential confounding activities, such as going to restaurants, outdoors or to the mall.
Given that the results appear to be driven by young males, and 'engaging in leisure activities at home' appears to be what church attendance is substituted for, is this evidence that video game use reduces crime? I'll leave that thought for some further consideration in the future.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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