The economic effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber hypothesis in the German Lands

Davide Cantoni

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the “Protestant ethic,” have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands of the Holy Roman Empire present an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures in a dataset comprising 272 cities in the years 1300–1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and does not appear to depend on data selection or small sample size. In addition, Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development. I also analyze the endogeneity of religious choice; instrumental variables estimates of the effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.

Keywords: Protestantism; Culture; Economic Growth; Historical Development; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N13 N33 O11 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1260.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION: TESTING THE WEBER HYPOTHESIS IN THE GERMAN LANDS (2015)
Working Paper: The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands (2015)
Working Paper: The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands (2013)
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:upf:upfgen:1260

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).