Luther and the girls: religious denomination and the female education gap in 19th century Prussia

Becker, Sascha O. und Wößmann, Ludger (2008): Luther and the girls: religious denomination and the female education gap in 19th century Prussia. CESifo Working Paper,

Abstract

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls’ schools in protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county’s or town’s distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.

• Dokumententyp: Paper
• Fakultät: Volkswirtschaft ; Volkswirtschaft > Lehrstühle > CESifo-Professur für Empirische Innovationsökonomik
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 330 Wirtschaft
• JEL Classification: I21, J16, N33, Z12
• Sprache: Englisch