Preprint / Working Paper
Details
Citation
Becker S & Woessmann L (2008) Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia. Stirling Economics Discussion Paper, 2008-20.
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.
Keywords
gender gap; education; Protestantism
JEL codes
- I21: Analysis of Education
- J16: Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- N33: Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: Europe: Pre-1913
- Z12: Cultural Economics: Religion
| Title of series | Stirling Economics Discussion Paper |
|---|---|
| Number in series | 2008-20 |
| Publication date online | 01/09/2008 |
| URL |