![]() ![]() In his inaugural lecture of 1895, Weber attributed differences in economic outcomes between Germans and Poles to racial differences and actively supported a stronger Germanisation of the eastern parts of Germany. Our finding on the role of ethnic differences on economic outcomes begs for an explanation the writings of Weber are a good starting point. Ethnicity and discrimination in the German Kaiserreich The coefficient on ethnic differences (as captured by share of the German-speaking population) is much larger and statistically and economically significant. Using this instrumental variable confirms the evidence from Figure 4: Protestantism had no significant effect on literacy. To account for minorities, we control for the share of people with German as mother tongue. We also test for a causal effect of religion on literacy, using the instrumental variable approach by Spenkuch (2017). To account for this, we use literacy among Catholics at the county level as our dependent variable and show that the share of Protestants in a county has no positive effect on literacy among Catholics. Eastern provinces include Poznan, Silesia, West and East Prussia. Interpretation: Protestants are over-proportionally literate in counties to the right of the 45-degree line. Notes: Each dot corresponds to one county in Prussia. ![]() Still, there might be potential spillovers of historically Protestant regions.įigure 4 Literacy and Protestantism, 1871 The only exception is among counties in the east, which have a substantial share of Polish people in the population (Figure 4b). Literacy rates among Catholics are nearly identical to literacy rates among Protestants (Figure 4c). A dot to the right of the 45-degree line indicates that Protestants are over-proportionally literate. We provide new descriptive evidence on the difference in literacy rates among Protestants and Catholics at the county level from a historical cross-table, which has been largely neglected in the literature.įigure 4 shows the share of Protestants among all literates and the share of Protestants for each county. We next test for the idea that Protestantism mattered not because of its effect on attitudes towards work and consumption, but because it fostered literacy. Crucially, this instrumental variable is not correlated with the share of German speakers and is generally more robust to potential violations of the exclusion restriction. This instrumental variable approach confirms our OLS findings. The residuals are used as the instrumental variable. The instrumental variable is constructed by regressing Protestant in 1624 on predictors of rulers’ choices within the Holy Roman Empire, as identified by the previous literature, notably Cantoni (2012) and Rubin (2014). Instead, we follow Spenkuch’s (2017) instrumental variable approach. However, such an instrument is likely to violate the exclusion restriction1 because it is strongly correlated with the share of German speakers. Becker and Woessmann (2009) ingeniously suggested using the distance to Wittenberg (the centre of the Protestant Reformation) as an instrument for Protestantism. To establish causality, we need to find a valid instrument. When we run simple pooled OLS, we find that the correlation between German speakers and savings per capita is strongly significant, while the correlation between Protestantism and savings remains insignificant. Figure 2 shows the distribution of savings per capita in 1905.įigure 1 Protestants in Prussian counties, 1900Ĭlearly, the share of Protestants and the share of German speakers are correlated (especially in the east of Prussia), but not perfectly. Figure 1 shows the share of Protestants in Prussian counties for 1900. To test for this, we use a recent dataset from Lehmann-Hasemeyer and Wahl (2017) on savings per capita for Prussian counties. Weber suggested that Protestantism has led to an “accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save” (Weber 1905: 191). We first revisit the evidence on the effect of Protestantism on saving behaviour. But there were huge differences between Germans and ethnic minorities, notably Poles. Protestants were in fact neither thriftier nor more literate than Catholics. We show that the empirical literature has largely missed the context in which Weber was writing, notably the relationship between religious and ethnic differences in Germany before 1914. 2020), we revisit Weber’s famous hypothesis and the evidence for it in 19th-century Germany. One hundred years later, sociologists and economists still debate this question in historical or contemporary settings (see Becker and Woessmann 2009, Cantoni 2015, Bai and Kung 2015, Spenkuch 2017, Alaoui and Sandroni 2018, among many others). Are Protestants thriftier or more literate than people of other beliefs, or not? Weber (1904, 1905) famously hypothesised that the Protestant work ethic fostered modern economic development through an “ascetic compulsion to save”.
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