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Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History*
Abstract
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. We test the theory using county-level data from late-nineteenth-century Prussia, exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation to use distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism. We find that Protestantism indeed led to higher economic prosperity, but also to better education. Our results are consistent with Protestants' higher literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity.
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Cites
The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation
Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., & Robinson, J. A. (2001) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.91.5.1369 · Cited by 8,517
Religion and economic growth: was Weber right?
Blum, U., & Dudley, L. (2001) · Journal of Evolutionary Economics · doi:10.1007/pl00003862 · Cited by 229
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Oster, E. (2019) · Journal of Business & Economic Statistics · doi:10.1080/07350015.2016.1227711 · Cited by 5,367
Human capital and industrialization: Evidence from the age of enlightenment
Squicciarini, M. P., & Voigtländer, N. (2015) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjv025 · Cited by 384
Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change
Giuliano, P., & Nunn, N. (2021) · The Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1093/restud/rdaa074 · Cited by 336
Acts of God? Religiosity and Natural Disasters Across Subnational World Districts*
Sinding Bentzen, J. (2019) · The Economic Journal · doi:10.1093/ej/uez008 · Cited by 299
The Importance of School Systems: Evidence from International Differences in Student Achievement
Woessmann, L. (2016) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.30.3.3 · Cited by 251
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Metadata
- Authors
- Becker, S. O., & Woessmann, L.
- Venue
- Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2009-05
- Volume
- 124
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 531-596
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-4650
- OpenAlex
- W2168966825
- Cited by
- 1,141
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 118.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Becker, S. O., & Woessmann, L. (2009). Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History*. Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.2.531
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
