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Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism

Felix Kersting, Iris Wohnsiedler and Nikolaus Wolf

No 8421, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We revisit Max Weber’s hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late nineteenth-century Prussia we reject Weber’s suggestion that Protestantism mattered due to an “ascetic compulsion to save”. Moreover, we find that income levels, savings, and literacy rates differed be-tween Germans and Poles, not between Protestants and Catholics, using pooled OLS and IV regressions. We suggest that this result is due to anti-Polish discrimination.

Keywords: Max Weber; protestantism; nationalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N13 N33 O16 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

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Journal Article: Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism (2019) Downloads
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