Protestant Economic History

500 years ago, according to legend, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of the castle church of Wittenberg – and changed the course of history. A major cause for this historical change was that the Reformation triggered an unprecedented push for education in the population. We show this in our research, for which we digitized data for the roughly 450 Prussian counties from archives that the Prussian Statistical Office had collected since the first population census in 1816.

Max Weber famously proposed the thesis that a specific Protestant work ethic promoted the economic success of Protestants. As an alternative, 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 suggests that the better education of Protestants can account for most of their economic lead over Catholics during the 19th century. The results show that the economic lead of the Protestants is owed less to a specific Protestant work ethics, as propagated by Weber, but rather to the better education of the Protestant population.

Besides the effects on education and income, our historical research also studies effects of Protestantism on suicides, effects of education and income on secularization, and effects of education on industrialization and fertility.

Non-technical contributions:

How Luther’s Quest for Education Changed German Economic History: 9+5 Theses on the Effects of the Protestant Reformation (with S.O. Becker). In: J.-P. Carvalho, S. Iyer, J. Rubin (eds.), Advances in the Economics of Religion, International Economic Association Series, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 215-227, 2019

Education and Socio-Economic Development during the Industrialization (with S.O. Becker). In: C. Diebolt, M. Haupert (eds.), Handbook of Cliometrics, 2nd ed., Berlin: Springer, 2019

Here you can learn more about my research on this topic.

My most important academic paper on the topic is:

Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History (with S.O. Becker). Quarterly Journal of Economics 124 (2): 531-596, 2009

I provide a non-technical overview in:

The Effects of the Protestant Reformation on Human Capital (with S.O. Becker). In: R.M. McCleary (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 93-110, 2011

A contribution about our research results in Handelsblatt Global, 10.3.2017

Another contribution about our research results: It’s Not About the Work Ethic, Stanford Social Innovation Review 2009

Additional material is available in German.