Does more education lead to less religion? According to a new working paper by Daniel M. Hungerman, an economist at Notre Dame who studies religion, the answer is yes.

Excerpt:

In this paper, I use Canadian compulsory schooling laws to identify the relationship between completed schooling and later religiosity.  I find that higher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious participation later in life. An additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition; the estimates suggest that increases in schooling can explain most of the large rise in non-affiliation in Canada in recent decades.

Find the full paper here:

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16973

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