Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation

Jared Rubin

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2014, vol. 96, issue 2, 270-286

Abstract: The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper seeks to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis that instruments for omitted variable bias with a city's distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were at minimum 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: printing; printing press; Protestant Reformation; information technology; revolt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N33 N73 O33 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (101)

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Working Paper: Printing and Protestants: reforming the economics of the Reformation (2011)
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