Nunziata Luca, Toffolutti Veronica
University of Padua, Italy.
IZA, Bonn, Germany.
SSM Popul Health. 2019 May 23;8:100412. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100412. eCollection 2019 Aug.
We provide a new identification strategy to analyse the implications of religious affiliation on unhealthful behaviour by focusing on the link between religiousness and smoking. Our quasi-experimental research design exploits the exogenous dramatic fall in religious affiliation that took place in East Germany after the post-war separation. Our conditional difference-in-differences estimates on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1998-2006 indicate that individuals who are not affiliated to any religious denomination are consistently 13-19 percentage points more likely to smoke than are religious individuals. We interpret our results on the basis of a restraining effect of religious ethics on unhealthy behaviour, confirming the view that religion is a far-reaching vehicle for the enforcement of social norms.
我们提供了一种新的识别策略，通过关注宗教信仰与吸烟之间的联系，来分析宗教归属对不健康行为的影响。我们的准实验研究设计利用了战后分裂后东德宗教归属的外生急剧下降这一情况。我们对1998 - 2006年德国社会经济面板（SOEP）数据的条件差分估计表明，无宗教信仰的个体吸烟的可能性始终比有宗教信仰的个体高13 - 19个百分点。我们基于宗教伦理对不健康行为的抑制作用来解释我们的结果，证实了宗教是执行社会规范的一种影响深远的手段这一观点。
