Research Paper
Cultural barriers to breast-cancer screening take-up
Publication details
Summary
I study the cultural determinants of breast-cancer screening take-up, focusing on the role of religious beliefs. To isolate the effect of culture from the institutional environment to which women are exposed, I apply the epidemiological approach, comparing first- and second-generation immigrants living in the same European host country and exploiting cross-country of origin variation in religiosity. By merging individual data from SHARE and UKHLS with country-level information from the World Values Survey, I find that higher religious intensity significantly reduces the probability of mammography screening uptake.