Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia

Sascha Becker, Ludger Woessmann and Sascha O. Becker
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Sascha O. Becker

No 2414, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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.

Keywords: gender gap; education; Protestantism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J16 N33 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (157)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia (2008)
Working Paper: Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia (2008)
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