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The minority ethic: Rethinking religious denominations, minority status, and educational achievement across the globe

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  • Pierre-Guillaume Méon
  • Ilan Tojerow
Abstract
We test whether major religious denominations correlate with education in a uniform way across the world and the extent to which minority status contributes to the correlation. Using individual data from the World Values Survey for 77 countries, we first find that no denomination is consistently associated with education and, in fact, for each denomination we study there are countries where its correlation with education is significantly positive, significantly negative, or statistically insignificant. To explain this unexpected result, we relate our first finding to minority status and find that denominations that are a minority in a given country positively correlate with the level of education of their followers in that country. Both findings uphold a series of robustness checks, including changing the definition of minority religions, excluding outliers, and changing the measure of education.
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  • Pierre-Guillaume Méon & Ilan Tojerow, 2019. "The minority ethic: Rethinking religious denominations, minority status, and educational achievement across the globe," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/301465, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    • Handle: RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/301465
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    4. Zhu, Chen & Shen, Jim Huangnan & Lee, Chien-Chiang & Liu, Shouying, 2022. "Does religion belief matter to self-employment of rural elderly? Evidence from China," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).

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    JEL classification:

    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
    • O5 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies
    • Z1 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics

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