Blue Laws and Our Money

I found this short article from the World Congress of Families so interesting:

Family Research Abstract of the Week: Blue Laws Not So Blue

State and local ordinances restricting commerce on Sunday were fairly widespread in America from colonial times until 1961. That's when the Supreme Court opened the door to constitutional challenges to "blue laws," after which most were repealed on merchants' claims that they imposed hardships on the public. But now comes a study by two noted economists that suggests rather than spreading a case of the blues, the secular fencing off of one day a week for worship, rest, and family yielded important social dividends. Using datasets from the General Social Survey (GSS), Jonathan Gruber of MIT and Daniel M. Hungerman of Notre Dame found that the repeal of Sunday-closing laws in 16 representative states between 1955 and 1991 triggered "a very strong reduction" in the frequency of church attendance in those same states between 1973 and 1998. Then looking at data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and state-by-state spending by congregations of four representative Protestant denominations between 1950 and 2000, they found that repeal triggered significant declines in giving to religious organizations, as well as in church budgets. Finally, looking at the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the economists found that repeal yielded increases in alcohol and illegal drug use among a cohort of young people, ages 14 to 21. Quantifying the strong and "striking" correlation between blue laws and church attendance, their analysis found that the change in state laws reduced attendance by about five percent of the median, what they term a sizeable effect roughly one-third as large as the well-established higher rate of attendance among women relative to men. They also observed a downshift in attendance-frequency categories, including a 15 percent decline in GSS respondents claiming to attend church weekly and increases in those claiming rare attendance. In addition, the sizeable decline in giving amounted to a 13 percent reduction in giving by individuals, as well as a statistically significant 6.3 percent drop in per-member spending by congregations associated with the United Methodist Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, and the United Church of Christ. Their analysis of the NLSY data, which tracks church attendance since 1979 and substance use between 1982 and 1994, found large and significant negative effects of repeal among church-attending youth that extend beyond a cut back in attendance. They found that church-going teens (relative to their peers that do not attend church) were 5.5 percent more likely to drink, which lowered the gap in heavy drinking between the religious and nonreligious youth by 50 percent. In addition, they were 11 percent more likely to use marijuana and 3.6 percent more likely to use cocaine, effects which closed the gaps completely in these behaviors between churched and unchurched youth. Specification tests, which included controls for a state's socioeconomic characteristics and changes in other types of social participation, confirmed that these findings were not driven by declines in religiosity that may have been occurring before repeal or by declines in membership and giving to nonreligious organizations after repeal. So while opening the mall on Sunday might deliver short-term gains to the corporate bottom line, these findings offer hard evidence that the move to turn the Lord's Day into just another hectic day of buying and selling was not possible without a critical loss of social capital.

(Source: Jonathan Gruber and Daniel M. Hungerman, "The Church vs. the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?" National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12410, July 2006.)