TY - JOUR AU - Dehejia, Rajeev AU - DeLeire, Thomas AU - Luttmer, Erzo F.P. AU - Mitchell, Joshua TI - The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13369 PY - 2007 Y2 - September 2007 DO - 10.3386/w13369 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13369 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13369.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Rajeev H. Dehejia Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service New York University 295 Lafayette Street, 2nd floor New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-998-7435 E-Mail: rajeev@dehejia.net Thomas DeLeire McCourt School of Public Policy Georgetown University Old North, Suite 100 37th and O Streets, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20057 Tel: (202) 687-5932 Fax: (202) 687-5544 E-Mail: td495@georgetown.edu Erzo F.P. Luttmer 6106 Rockefeller Center, Room 305 Department of Economics Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755 Tel: 603/646-6479 E-Mail: Erzo.FP.Luttmer@Dartmouth.Edu Joshua Mitchell US Census Bureau E-Mail: jmitchell@welchcon.com M1 - published as Rajeev Dehejia, Thomas DeLeire, Erzo F. P. Luttmer, Josh Mitchell. "The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth," in Jonathan Gruber, editor, "The Problems of Disadvantaged Youth: An Economic Perspective" University of Chicago Press (2009) M3 - presented at "Conference on Disadvantaged Youth", April 13-14, 2007 AB - This paper examines whether participation in religious or other social organizations can help offset the negative effects of growing up in a disadvantaged environment. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, we collect measures of disadvantage as well as parental involvement with religious and other social organizations when the youth were ages 3 to 19 and we observe their outcomes 13 to 15 years later. We consider a range of definitions of disadvantage in childhood (family income and poverty measures, family characteristics including parental education, and child characteristics including parental assessments of the child) and a range of outcome measures in adulthood (including education, income, and measures of health and psychological wellbeing). Overall, we find strong evidence that youth with religiously active parents are less affected later in life by childhood disadvantage than youth whose parents did not frequently attend religious services. These buffering effects of religious organizations are most pronounced when outcomes are measured by high school graduation or non-smoking and when disadvantage is measured by family resources or maternal education, but we also find buffering effects for a number of other outcome-disadvantage pairs. We generally find much weaker buffering effects for other social organizations. ER -