This was the capstone project for my undergraduate degree. I majored in Economics but the only requirement for the project was that it should incorporate statistical analysis so I used linear regression for this project. All of the analysis was done using Stata.

Research on the connections between religiosity and crime has intensified in recent years. Much of the work done has focused on experimental data from religious programs conducted on a small scale. In order to address the need for a more expansive exploration of the topic, this paper aims to explore observational data from over 50 geographically and religiously diverse countries to investigate whether religion is associated negatively with crime. We will start by describing two competing theoretical frameworks that deal with the causal links between spiritual belief and lawbreaking before considering the contributions and weaknesses of past literature. The section on methodology will build on this theoretical base to test the competing models through the procedure of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Our findings and their relevant policy implications will then be thoroughly discussed before we present our conclusion.

Click here for the PDF of the report. Click here for the Powerpoint presentation although it might be a bit difficult to make sense without reading the report.