Religious adherence and county economic growth in the US

We estimate a Barro-type conditional convergence model using religious adherence data from the American Religious Data Archive to analyze independent effects of church adherence rates on economic growth in the United States at the county-level. Per capita income growth is modeled as a function of initial per capita income, initial human capital stock, and a set of control and related variables including religious adherence, religious diversity, and regional indicator variables. We also investigate the independent effects of three main denominations, namely Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Mainline Christians, on county economic growth. Our results indicate that the religious adherence in general is significantly greater than zero and not beneficial for US county income growth. We find mixed results for effects of various denominations.