Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/26459 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 2414
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county's or town's distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.
Subjects: 
Gender gap
education
protestantism
JEL: 
I21
J16
N33
Z12
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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