**4.2 Empirical estimation**

324 Sociological Landscape – Theories, Realities and Trends

groups with strict requirements. In particular, the model shows that efficient religions with perfectly rational members may benefit from stigma, self-sacrifice and bizarre behavioral restrictions because deviant norms mitigate the free-rider problems faced by religious groups. Bisin and Verdier (2000) extend the study of religion into an intergenerational framework. Assuming that parents get more utility if the children adopt their religion, Bisin and Verdier (2000) present an economic analysis of the intergenerational transmission of religious traits through family socialization and marital segregation. Barros and Garoupa (2002) introduce spatial location models into the economics of religion. Dehejia et al. (2005) show that involvement with religious organizations insures an individual's stream of

This study is also related to the human capital models based on social interactions. In analysing the relationship between religion and social factors, there are several important theoretical papers. For example, Borjas (1992) and Lundberg and Startz (1998) analyze models in which an individual's human capital is determined by the average level of human capital of the ethnic group to which she belongs as well as her own parental human capital. Benabou (1993) suggests that the neighborhoods with a high level of average parental human capital facilitate one's human capital formation. He shows that neighborhoods are formed endogenously, higher income people live in the communities whose rent and average level of human capital are both higher. Epple and Romano (1998) and Brock and Durlauf (2001b) posit that a student's academic achievement is determined by both her own ability/effort and mean ability/effort of her classmates. Epple and Romano (1998) show that in equilibrium, parents who have high income and high-ability children pay high tuition to send their children to private schools in which there is better peer-group externality than public schools. In summary, the existing theoretical literature implies that education is related with religious activities; besides, religious activities are related with other social factors. The following part of the empirical research aims to detect the relationship of education and religious activities, as well as the relationship between religious activities and

This part of the research describes the data used for analysis and the methodology applied

We draw data from the General Social Survey (GSS) of the USA in our empirical analysis. The General Social Survey is conducted by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. The dataset is collected through a detailed personal interview survey of U.S. The GSS contains social and demographic characteristics of families. Most importantly, GSS is a rich dataset that contains rich information about people's religious activities of the sample. The religious variables include "how often the person attend religious services", "how many times a person prays every day", "allow anti-religionist to teach", etc. Besides, the GSS data also includes information about people's education achievement such as one's the highest degree. The GSS is not a panel data, which means that it does not follow the same objectives every year. The data from the year 2010, which is the

most recent available dataset used for the analysis of this paper.

consumption and of happiness.

other social factors.

**4. Methodology** 

**4.1 Data** 

for estimation of the results.
