A Method for Proxying a Respondent's Religious Background: An Application to School Choice Decisions

This paper develops an algorithm for the probability distribution of a respondent's religion in microdata (including the decennial census) in which there are data on ancestry but not on religion. A frequency distribution of religion by ancestry is generated from the General Social Survey and matched by ancestry groups in the U.S. decennial census. The fruitfulness of the procedure is demonstrated through an analysis of the effect of alternative measures of religion on the household's choice of public versus private schooling for children. This method is useful to any researcher wanting to distinguish religious affiliation when only ancestry data are available.