Economic History
Overview
As an alternative to Max Weber's thesis that a specific Protestant ethic was responsible for the economic success of Protestants, my research with Sascha Becker suggests a "human capital theory of Protestant economic history": Luther's request that all Christians should be able to read the Bible by themselves triggered a push for education that ultimately also had economic consequences. Our evidence from 19th-century Prussia suggests that the better education of Protestants can account for most of their economic lead over Catholics.
Beyond denominational differences, our research using digitized Prussian micro-regional data of the 19th century also shows that the basic education of the population had an important impact on industrialization.
Furthermore, education had a strong effect on fertility decline and thus on the demographic transition.
Using unique data on participation in holy communion, we show that increased attendance of advanced schools was an important determinant of secularization in the form of reduced church attendance at the turn to the 20th century. By contrast, we do not find evidence of a causal effect of increased income on secularization.
In additional work, we show that the long-gone Habsburg Empire still leaves traces in Eastern Europe today in terms of trust in public institutions and corruption.
In another project, we show that the later border between the communist East and the capitalist West Germany is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data, suggesting that German division and reunification do not provide a straightforward natural experiment to study enduring "effects" of communism.
Another case of historical persistence is that the resistance of the Catholic church against the emerging state school system in the second half of the 19th century is still visible in larger sectors of privately operated schools today, which in turn contribute to better student achievement.
We also prepared an extensive survey on the role of religion in economic history.