The Role of Religion in Union Formation: An Economic Perspective

Previous research has shown that the faith in which a young woman is brought up has important effects on the subjective costs and/or benefits of many decisions that she makes over the life cycle, including schooling, employment, and fertility. Based on this evidence, the present paper develops hypotheses regarding patterns of entry into marriage and cohabitation for the main religious groups in the United States: mainline Protestants, conservative Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and the unaffiliated. The empirical results, based on young women from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, are generally supportive of the hypotheses.