Malthus Meets Luther: The Economics Behind the German Reformation

Malik Curuk and Sjak Smulders ()

No 6010, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The Reformation provided a powerful source of legitimacy for secularization of governance and enabled the regional authorities to change the institutional structure to eliminate the inefficiencies under the prevailing (Catholic) regime. We investigate this idea in a simple model of regime change and show that the regions where the prevailing institutions are less appropriate, i.e. poorer regions with greater economic potential, should have been more likely to adopt the Reformation. Using detailed data on religious denominations, city characteristics and exogenous measures of agricultural potential, we empirically confirm this hypothesis for the cities in the 16th century Holy Roman Empire. This finding points to an economic rationale of the adoption of Protestantism as a vehicle of institutional change.

Keywords: institutional change; appropriate institutions; Malthusian growth; economics of religion; German Reformation; regional autonomy; agricultural potential; urbanization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 N33 N43 N53 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6010.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().