Catholic Wage Effect

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In “The Wage Effects of Being Raised in the Catholic Religion: Does Religion Matter?” by Ewing, his focus is on the effects of being raised Catholic on future wages dubbed the “Catholic Wage Premium”. He mentions that previous literature relating to a wage premium tends to focus mostly on Catholic School education, and so, he emphasizes the importance of his study as there is very little literature and no clear answer about the effects of being raised Catholic on future wages. In order to determine the extent of the Catholic Wage Premium, he uses the data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), which is a dataset that follows a series of young respondents (ages 14-22) from 1979 until 2014 (the most recent survey year). …show more content…
Based on the research and the observable decline in the amount of Hispanics (and people in general) identifying as Catholic over time, we can extrapolate that the further back we go the more people (to an certain extent) were identifying as Catholic--meaning that in 1979 (when the NLSY started) there would be more Catholics than the ~70 percent in Perl et al study that used data from the late 1990 to early 2000s. In the sample used for Ewing’s study and my recreation of the study, there are 526 identified Hispanics out of a sample set of 3534 (14.88%) , 459 of which also identified as Catholic. This makes the percentage of Catholic Hispanics in the sample from NLSY79 about 78%, which aligns with both Smith’s and Perl et al’s proof of a decline--making a 78% Catholic Hispanic sample size reasonable from this data …show more content…
Patten (2016) reinforces this with her analysis showing that the average Hispanic man making 14 dollars/hour in 2015 and the average Hispanic woman making 12 dollars/hour, when you include both part-time and full-time workers. The average white man makes 21 dollars/hour and the average white woman makes 17 dollars/hour, while the average Black man make 15 dollars/hour, and average Black woman make 13 dollars/hour. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018) showed that the average weekly pay for Hispanic men working full time was 692 dollars which equates to about 17-19 dollars an hour depending on if they are working a 35 or 40 hour work week, and 596 dollars for Hispanic women equating to 15-17 dollars an hour, while other race’s make substantially