Research

Utilizing mobility data from 15 million smartphone users, we examine the pandemic's impact on in-person religious attendance in the US. Attendance declined sharply in March 2020 and recovered slowly thereafter. Notably, religious attendance rebounded more gradually than other activities like restaurant visits. There were also variations across religious groups, with Catholics returning at a slower pace than Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. By 2022, Protestants and Catholics reached around 85-90 percent of their 2019 attendance; other groups such as Latter-day Saints, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus had fully returned to pre-pandemic levels. We then introduce a novel approach to examine the impact of religious policies on behavior, leveraging variations in the timing of dispensation rescissions by US Catholic bishops. Using a difference-in-differences event study model, we find a short-term 2-4 percentage point increase in Catholic weekend church attendance following the lifting of dispensations, compared to the 2019 baseline. However, this effect fades over time and is smaller than the attendance surge seen after reopening churches post-lockdowns. These results suggest that religious policies impact behavior, though their effects may be transient.n.

This paper asks whether funding for public schools affects private school enrollment. To examine the causality, I utilize the fact that states with greater historical reliance on state appropriations and states with no income tax experienced larger cuts for public K-12 education funding after the Great Recession. I find that students exposed to a $1,000 (9.2 percent) decrease in per-pupil funding are more likely to enroll in private schools by 0.46 to 0.62 percentage points. I show further that the effect is strongest among high socioeconomic status students living in disadvantaged areas, which suggests a change in student composition.