updated divine policy resubmission AEJ AE

Author: chickymonkeys

content/research/research-3.md

@@ -20,4 +20,4 @@ infos:
   - info: "_Conditionally Accepted_ at **American Economic Journal: Applied Economics**."
 ---
 
-How do strengthened church-state relations impact religiosity and social values? To examine, we exploit the staggered introduction of the faith-based initiatives across US states. Introduced by conservative Protestants in the 1990s, these policies aimed to improve conditions for faith-based groups and to increase their numbers. Our difference-in-differences analysis reveals that the initiatives managed to increase the number of faith-based nonprofits and to strengthen religiosity and conservative-religious social views — such as attitudes against LGBTQ+ and abortion. Effects were only felt by Protestants. Notably, 9% of Americans who were not regular churchgoers started attending monthly or more. Of the 10,274 new faith-based organizations during the period, 15% may have opened due to the faith-based initiatives. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that these organizations may potentially have reached 8.2% of American Protestants. Effects are plausibly causal; we find no systematic differences prior to implementation, evidence is robust to using novel staggered-rollout designs, restricting comparison to contiguous counties, and to estimation based on triple differences exploiting religious group heterogeneity. Our results contribute to explaining US polarization and highlight consequences of tightened church-state relations.
+How do strengthened church-state relations impact religiosity and social values? To examine, we exploit the staggered introduction of the faith-based initiatives across US states. Introduced by conservative Protestants in the 1990s, these policies aimed to improve conditions for faith-based groups and increase their numbers. Our difference-in-differences analysis reveals that the initiatives increased the number of faith-based nonprofits and strengthened religiosity and conservative-religious social views — such as attitudes against LGBTQ+ and abortion. 9% of Americans who were not regular churchgoers started attending monthly or more. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the faith-based organizations established as a result of the initiatives may have reached 4.9 million followers yearly. Effects are plausibly causal; we find no systematic differences prior to implementation, evidence is robust to using novel staggered roll-out designs, restricting comparison to contiguous counties, and to estimation based on triple differences exploiting religious group heterogeneity. Effects were only felt by Protestants, while the rest continued to secularize and modernize. Our results contribute to explaining US polarization and highlight consequences of tightened church-state relations.