Authors: Seth Cannon
Mentors: Joe Price
Insitution: Brigham Young University
We use the occupation strings in the full-count US census files from 1880-1940 to create a new dataset of everyone during this time period that listed their occupation as a clergy (or related term). We use this data to identify the number of clergy located in each town in the United States in each census year. We find that towns with at least one person that identifies as clergy in the census record experience 5.4% greater population growth by the next census compared to towns without any clergy. This result is robust to various ways to control for the population and other characteristics of the town. We also focus on just the set of towns that had only one person in the census who identified as clergy. When we restrict the dataset to these towns, we find that the towns for whom that single clergy member died before the next census experienced an average population loss of 2.8%, while towns that didn’t have their clergy die experienced a population growth of 12.5%. These results highlight the ways in which access to local religious resources can help promote economic growth in small communities.