Professor Klick Responds

Responding to Rob's post and my speculation about his paper, Salvation as Selective Incentive, Jonathan Klick writes:

Thanks for the attention your blog is giving to my old (in working paper form at least, though it just now made it into an econ journal) paper “Salvation as a Selective Incentive.”  The econometric design does control for the possibility of larger Catholic families (though, truth be told, during the relevant time period Catholic families were not systematically larger than Southern Baptist families or AOG families, which are also in the dataset, but are larger than the other two denominations in the dataset – Presbyterians and Lutherans) in earlier years and does control for income/wealth directly as well.

The stronger alternative hypothesis to the one I argue for is that there is simply a very strong difference between those Catholics who had their formative years before Vatican II and after Vatican II and that drives my results.  I provide some indirect evidence against this possibility such as discussion of others people’s work that suggests “formative years” type analyses (especially wrt Catholics and Vatican II) do not explain other kinds of religious data.  Also, in my sample, my “near death” category of Catholics (those aged > 75) look substantially different in their giving behavior than do those in the next oldest groups (65-70 & 70-75 controlling for income, demographic, etc differences) even though all members from those groups would have had their formative experiences pre Vatican II (the data are from a 1993 survey).

However, I cannot directly rule out the possibility because as of yet we do not have any very old Catholics whose formative years occurred after Vatican II to create a sufficient control group.

Thanks again for the attention.  As a fellow Catholic law prof, I visit the blog from time.

Jon