Arbeitspapier
Was Weber wrong? A human capital theory of protestant economic history
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from late 19th-century Prussia reveal that Protestantism was indeed associated not only with higher economic prosperity, but also with better education. We find that Protestants' higher literacy can account for the whole gap in economic prosperity. Results hold when we exploit the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation to use distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism.
- Sprache
-
Englisch
- Erschienen in
-
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 2886
- Klassifikation
-
Wirtschaft
- Thema
-
Protestantismus
Bildungsinvestition
Analphabetismus
Entwicklung
Wirtschaftsgeschichte
Wirtschaftssoziologie
Preußen
Deutschland (bis 1945)
- Ereignis
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (wer)
-
Becker, Sascha O.
Woessmann, Ludger
- Ereignis
-
Veröffentlichung
- (wer)
-
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
- (wo)
-
Bonn
- (wann)
-
2007
- Handle
- Letzte Aktualisierung
-
20.09.2024, 08:21 MESZ
Datenpartner
Dieses Objekt wird bereitgestellt von:
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.
Objekttyp
- Arbeitspapier
Beteiligte
- Becker, Sascha O.
- Woessmann, Ludger
- Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Entstanden
- 2007
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