Church, State and Education: School Funding and Catholic Ass imilation in the U.S
Abstract:
We study how the allocation of public funds affects the diffusio n of confessional schools and the assimilation of immigrants. We focus on t he Age of Mass Migration, when about 15 million European Catholics migrated to the US, where public schools were de facto Protestant. To this pur pose, we combine newly digitized data on Catholic parochial schools fo r the period 1872-1925 with the full count US Censuses, where Catholic immi grants are identified through their nationality. We leverage on the stagger ed adoption of amendments across states between 1870-1920 aimed at defundin g confessional education (the so-called Blaine Amendments), and furthe r exploit county-level variation in the size of Catholic communities to ach ieve identification. We find that a cut in public funding for confessional education reduced the presence and the attendance to Catholic schools. Howe ver, the effect of Blaine amendments on immigrants' assimilation was more n uanced: while we observe a positive effect on human capital accumulation, e specially through schools, there was instead a negative impact on inter-gro up assimilation between Catholics and natives.
DTSTAMP:20260426T054737Z DTSTART:20240412T130000Z DTEND:20240412T140000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR