Good Faith and Bad Health: Self-Assessed Religiosity and Self-Assessed Health of Women and Men in Europe
- PDF / 703,923 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 17 Downloads / 180 Views
Good Faith and Bad Health: Self‑Assessed Religiosity and Self‑Assessed Health of Women and Men in Europe Niclas Berggren1,2 · Martin Ljunge1 Accepted: 6 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Religion exerts a powerful influence on many people’s lives. We investigate how selfassessed religiosity affects self-assessed health in Europe. Our sample consists of individuals with a native father and an immigrant mother from another European country. This sample allows for a causal interpretation since we can use the religiosity of the mother’s birth country as an instrument for individual religiosity in the first stage of a 2SLS regression analysis, which is related, in the second stage, to the individual’s health assessment. We find that the more religious are substantially more likely to report bad health. Several robustness tests offer a strong confirmation of the negative relationship between selfassessed religiosity and self-assessed health. Notably, this negative relationship is concentrated among women. The analysis indicates that religious constraints on women’s autonomy can impair their health. Keywords Health · Religion · Instrumental variables (IV) estimation · Gender · Women’s health
1 Introduction Religion is a powerful phenomenon, yet its intensity varies greatly across countries and individuals. For example, when Gallup (2009) asked representative samples in 143 countries whether religion is an important part of daily life, almost everyone answered “yes” in countries such as Egypt, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. But even in more developed countries like Switzerland, South Korea, Canada, Singapore and Austria, 40–55% answered in the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-020-02495-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Niclas Berggren [email protected] Martin Ljunge [email protected] 1
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Box 55665, 102 15 Stockholm, Sweden
2
Department of Economics (KEKE NF), University of Economics, Winston Churchill Square 4, 130 67 Prague 3, Czech Republic
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
N. Berggren, M. Ljunge
affirmative. The median share in the 27 developed countries included was 38%. The United States stands at 64%. Then there are rather irreligious countries as well, with shares around 20%: Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the Czech Republic top this list. From a social-science point of view, not least since Max Weber’s analysis of the Protestant work ethic, it is clear that religion affects people in certain ways and that it, therefore, is a determinant of important individual and aggregate outcomes.1 One such outcome, and the focus of this study, is health. Why focus on health? It is certainly a strong policy goal embraced not only by national governments, but also by international organizations like the World Health Organization and the World Bank. It is not hard to see why. Health is first and foremost a concern for individuals and fami
Data Loading...
