|
EconStor >
ifo Institut – Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung an der Universität München >
CESifo Working Papers, CESifo Group Munich >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/10419/26032
|
| | |
| Title: | | Was Weber wrong?: a human capital theory of protestant economic history  |
| Authors: | | Becker, Sascha O. Woessmann, Ludger |
| Issue Date: | | 2007 |
| Series/Report no.: | | CESifo working paper 1987 |
| Abstract: | | 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 19thcentury 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. |
| JEL: | | N33 Z12 I20 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | CESifo Working Papers, CESifo Group Munich
|
| |
| | |
Download bibliographical data as:
BibTeX
|
| |
Share on:http://hdl.handle.net/10419/26032
|
Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
|