Prayer can reduce depression: some econometric evidence

There has been a lot of work in recent years by economists on the determinants of people’s well-being. Many of these determinants are not something you can do much about at least in the short run, like income or health.

In a paper in press in Social Science and Medicine I look at the effect of prayer on the number of symptoms of depression recorded by individuals in the previous month. The data is from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) . I use the Euro-D scale which was designed to measure the incidence of depression symptons in an older population – it is not a diagnostic scale.

There are many studies looking at associations between well-being or mental health and either religion affiliation or devotion. Freud took a rather dim view of religion and this has cast a long shadow on the issue. As far as I can see, he did not do any serious data analysis so its unclear to me why one should put any weight on his views.

A problem of course in this literature, is whether one can infer anything causal. After all, people who are feeling down might easily turn to religion as a response. I use instrumental variable estimation to tackle this issue.

This turns a positive association (prayer positively correlated with depression) to a negative one i.e. prayer reduces the number of depression symptoms. This is not that surprising in a sense: if prayer made you more miserable on average, you would have an incentive not to do it. The results are robust to various combinations of instruments.

The magnitude of the effect (of praying at least daily) is comparable to that associated with different marital statuses, about half that of being female and twice as big as the effect of being unemployed.

I speculate on the possible mechanisms behind this effect, noting that it may not be the religious aspect per se. There is increasing evidence of the benefits of meditition and mindfulness based techniques for reducing depression and anxiety.

Losing our religion? Religious attendance amongst Irish children

Once upon a time, and it probably wasn’t that long ago, young people in Ireland went to church because thats what people did. But the position of religion in Ireland has changed dramatically in recent years and we also have a more heterogenous population because of immigration. So what is the situation now?

The Growing Up in Ireland survey asked parents how often their children (9 year olds) attend religious service.

The graph shows the responses. Virtually none attend on a daily basis and about 50% on a weekly basis. About 28% attend either monthly or less often.Around 14% attend on special occasions, presumably Christmas, weddings and so on.

There is an interesting rural/urban split (not shown here) with the “weekly” category much higher in rural areas (roughly 57% vs. 37%). The data does not allow one to distinguish between different denominations or Christian vs. non-Christian faiths.

These numbers don’t augur well for organized religions in the future ‘though probably some are doing much better than others.

Say a little prayer

Being able to trust people is important. Yet dishonesty is pervasive. In Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational book he describes this as a tragedy of the commons problem since dishonest people or companies lower the level of trust generally. So what to do?
One simple solution is priming. In a series of experiments, Ariely and co-authors Mazar & Amir had subjects think about the 10 Commandments (the actual commandments & not the movie of the same name) before completing a task and being rewarded for their success where they had the opportunity to cheat. Sure enough they cheated significantly less than the controls. It turns out that there are more than 10 commandments in the 10 commandments since they differ between Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths: only Catholics are required not to covet their neighbours' wives for example.
There is a curious angle to all this since the presence of a monument displaying the 10 commandments on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol (pictured) and also in a Kentucky courthouse generated long-running and heated court battles that reached the US Supreme Court. Whatever about the legal merits of the case (which centers on the separation of church and state and on the freedom of speech) it seems possible from the experimental evidence that the presence of the monument (and similar monuments) might generate more honest behaviour in these important contexts. Wouldn't that be a good thing?

Losing my religion - or my income?

Further to Liam's post below on religion and savings, here is an earnings equation with denomination using the SHARE data. Catholics fare no worse than Protestants, the reference group. There is a penalty to being a member of the Orthodox faith and an even bigger penalty to being Muslim or "other" religion, I'm guessing that the latter are largely non-Christian faiths emanating from Asia. Atheists are not penalized, in this life anyway. For comparison purposes I have included the coefficient on just one of the controls: being female which is bigger than any of the religion effects. Why there are such effects is a good question, one on which I shall remain agnostic.

	Gross income €
Protestant	.
	.
Catholics	709.6
	(0.75)
Orthodox	-3399.1
	(1.95)
Jewish	-4884.2
	(1.42)
Muslim	-7268.4**
	(2.80)
Other	-4859.2**
	(2.63)
No religion	-156.9
	(0.20)
Missing	-850.6
	(0.65)
woman	-9576.0***
	(15.87)

Controls:age,age squared, education,height,cognitive ability, country effects,
n=14,594

Religion and Savings

Economic Logic blog points to the following paper on religion and savings.

“Striving for Savings” – religion and individual economic behavior

Author info | Abstract | Publisher info | Download info | Related research | Statistics

Author Info

Anja Klaubert (Klaubert@leuphana.de) (Institute of Economics, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany)

Abstract

In the Neoclassical growth model the saving ratio and human capital might be seen as the most important factors fostering economic growth. At last since Weber [2005 (1904/05)] it seems clear, that religious beliefs and involvement shapes both social and economic human behavior. This paper tests the hypothesis whether religious belonging and believing influence a household’s economic decision-making in the USA, which was found to foster economic growth, namely the saving ratio at the individual level. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find religious effects on saving. Regarding the decision to save money no large differences within the Christian religions, namely Protestants and Catholics, were found. However, large differences exist compared to non-religious people as well as to Non-Christians and Jews.

Religious belief, devotion and well-being

Recently my thoughts turned to God, well religion. The fact that I was high in the sky (literally and neither metaphorically nor narcotically) may have had something to do with it. Some people have claimed that there are significant benefits to either being religious or to religous devotion (i.e. prayer). I think the Iona Institute published something on this a while back and I'm pretty sure that I was skeptical for a number of reasons, the most obvious one being that the results cited were just correlations rather than causal. To me, there is something rather profane about arguing the case for religion on the basis that it benefits you in this life. That said, several evangelists claim that God wants you to be rich and, if you buy their book, you will find out how (including "economist/entrepreneur/professor Paul Zane Pilzer"). But, nevertheless, if there are such benefits, they are scientifically interesting.

Leaving aside issues of causality for the moment, I thought it useful to examine the association between several measures of well-being and two measures of religion whether one is a believer and frequency of prayer. Without making any great claims, this is a bit more sophisticated than some studies I have seen.
The results below show a curious pattern. Both frequency of prayer and being a believer are positively associated with an ordinal measure of life satisfaction.
However using a measure of depression (the Euro-d scale) there is a paradox: believers are likely to have lower levels of depression (consistent with the first result, perhaps) but those who pray often are more likely to have depression. Curious, isn't it?
Of course life satisfaction and depression are not the same so we should not expect them to necessarily display the same patterns. It may be the case that endogeneity/reverse causality has something to do with this: perhaps depression drives you to pray more often. But then why not low life satisfaction also?
I have been done some work controlling for endogeneity with interesting results but what they are I am not going to tell you. All I will say is it beat the in-flight movie. Keep the faith, whatever that is.


............Satisfied (1-4). Depression (0-10)

pray-often: 0.0129* . 0.0830***

believer : 0.147*** . -0.275***


1st model is an ordered probit, 2nd model is an OLS regression

controls:age,marital status,education,height, cognitive ability,country effects
n=15,275. Data=SHARE.
Apologies for the lousy formatting.

Some Blog Links

1. A new report from the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training: "The skill matching challenge: Analysing skill mismatch and policy implications". HT: Michael Egan. [The report is largely based on the contributions of Nigel O’Leary and Peter Sloane (Welmerc, School of Business and Economics, Swansea University), Seamus McGuinness and Philip O’Connell (ESRI – Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin) and Kostas Mavromaras (NILS – National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia).]

"With global competition increasing, demographic change unfolding and rapid technological change intensifying, skill mismatch has come to the forefront of Europe’s policy debate (European Commission, 2008). Skill mismatch refers not only to skill shortages or gaps, but also to qualifications, knowledge and skills exceeding job requirements."

2. The U-S unemployment rate fell from 10 to 9.7 percent in January, but a Gallup poll out yesterday found that nearly one out of every five members of the country's workforce is underemployed. That's about 30 million Americans who are without jobs or unable to find full-time work.

3. NYT: "Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions. Roughly 2.7 million jobless Americans will lose their unemployment check before the end of April... unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments"

4. The Economist: God help the jobless

5. How business meetings are done at Google

6. Another Web 2.0 data-based (ad)-venture: Trendrr

For God's sake: religion and growth

This is a nice piece discussing work by Barro & McCleary on religion and growth

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/15/the_curious_economic_effects_of_religion/?page=full

Economy May Screw You but God Wont

An interesting take on the religion as insurance theme in the Irish Independent newspaper

link here

Religion is Good for your Health

Stumbling and Mumbling blog pick up on the Angus Deaton religion paper

link here

A link to the paper is below. As said in the conclusions, don't rush out to mass just yet. The association is likely due to very long-lasting effects of religion on habits and dispositions.

Deaton - Aging, Religion and Health

For the love of God

A while back there were blog entry by me about a report released by the Iona Institute & written by Patricia Casey regarding the association between well-being and religiousity. I was quite critical since I think the literature surveyed (which tends to find a positive association if any) was essentially a correlation but appeared to be interpreted as causal i.e that religion made one better off. To paraphrase the great theologian, Fr Jack, "That would be an empirical matter". In the absence of some form of exogenous assignment of religion I don't see how these epidemiological analyses can tell us anything causal.
In the spirit of methodological ecumenism & in a moment of idleness I thought to consider the question of whether particular denominations are associated with greater happiness. Using the ESS (rounds 1 to 3) I regress happiness (on a 0 to 10 scale) on denomination, a measure of religiousity and a bunch of controls (which all behave sensibly, details on request).
Relative to the non-religious, Protestants are the big winners, in fact the only winners. Catholics and Jews are no better off. Orthodox Christians & Muslims are worse off. However there is a positive gradient to (self-reported) religiousity. Frequency of prayer doesn't kick-in & is not included.
The results are robust to choice of estimator: using ordered probit or a Tobit doesn't change things.

(1) happy (0 - 10) (robust t statistic in parentheses)
Roman Catholic 0.0190 (1.08)
Protestant 0.0902*** (5.19)
Orthodox -0.195** (3.26)
Other Christian -0.0492 (1.13)
Jewish -0.288 (1.41)
Muslim -0.349*** (5.48)
Eastern -0.171 (1.64)
Other non Christian -0.118 (0.96)
Religiousity 0.0603*** (23.62)

controls:age, living alone, health, disability, sex, education, whether foreign, country dummies.