Do religious people buy less porn on Sundays?
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A paper has recently been published on this topic using the number of paid subscriptions to online porn sites by zip code to see if neighborhoods with higher levels of religious service attendance buy more or less online porn then those with lower levels of church attendance. Even when the author controls for income (more porn in higher-income neighborhoods), education (more porn for those neighborhoods with high levels of college education but less porn where more have graduate degrees), population density (city dwellers watch more porn then those in other areas), and marriage rates (people watch less porn where marriage rates are high), he finds no difference between the number of internet porn subscriptions in neighborhoods with high religious attendance and those where attendance is low. The only difference is that in the neighborhoods with high religious attendance people are less likely to subscribe to an online porn site on a Sunday. In fact, a 1% increase in the share of people in a neighborhood regularly attending a religious service is associated with a decrease by 0.1% of online porn subscriptions started on a Sunday. Overall though, the same number of subscriptions is purchased over the course of the week.
Source is Marina Adshade referring to the paper “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
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