Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History

By Sascha O. Becker, Ludger Woessmann. 2009

1,363 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c99036b3c64340d3633656c4e5d71cb478dc67d

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Citations in the corpus

Can Cultural Norms Reduce Conflicts? Confucianism and Peasant Rebellions in (2014, neutral): “…(such as Christianity), whose strength can be measured by, for instance, the share of communicants in a population (e.g., Bai and Kung, 2014; Becker and Woessmann, 2009), Confucianism resembles more of a set of social norms, and therefore lacks a clear-cut standard with which to identify…”
The long-run impact of human capital on innovation and economic development in the regions of Europe (2018, methodology): “Shares of agriculture or industry have been used in different historical publications where GDP per capita estimates are not available (e.g., Good 1994; Hatton and Williamson 1994; Becker and Woessmann 2009).”
The Effect of Protestantism on Education Before the Industrialization: Evidence from 1816 Prussia (2010, background): “…strengthens the explanation that better education lies at the root of Protestant economic development during the times of industrialization: 1 See Becker and Woessmann (2009), who also provide evidence on a positive association between Protestantism and education across 22 countries in 1900 and…”
Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press (2011, background): “Print media played a key role in the acquisition and development of skills that were valuable to merchants.(11) The ability to calculate interest rates, profit shares, and exchange rates was associated with high returns for merchants engaged in large scale and long-distance trade.”
Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment (2015, neutral): “tion, their impact on literacy can be substantial (Becker and Woessmann 2009).”
From Stagnation to Sustained Growth: The Role of Female Empowerment (2013, background): “…explained by several factors: diffusion of the official French language, difference in attitudes toward education between Catholics and Protestants (Becker and Woessmann, 2009), wave of spreading ideas coming from Prussia (Luther), insufficiency of educational resources deployed in rural areas (in…”
Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change (2017, background): “Also related are the recent findings that environmental shocks can affect conflict (Bai and Kung, 2011; Jia, 2014) and religiosity (Chaney, 2013; Bentzen, 2015; Belloc et al., 2016).”
Institutions, Human Capital and Development: Online Appendix (2014, positive): “4 Because Protestant missionaries played an important role in setting up schools, partly motivated by their desire to encourage reading of the Scriptures, this may have had a durable impact on schooling (Woodberry 2004, 2012; Becker & Woessmann 2009).”
Dialects, Cultural Identity, and Economic Exchange (2012, neutral): “In particular, the positive effect of religious differences on migration may capture an enduri g prosperity difference between Catholic and Protestant areas, which was recognized early on by Max Weber and studied further by Becker and Woessmann (2009).”
A story of large landowners and math skills: Inequality and human capital formation in long-run development, 1820–2000 (2014, background): “Exogenous factors (not influenced by economic variables) include, for example, religious educational values (Botticini and Eckstein, 2007; Becker and Woessmann, 2009).”
Landownership Concentration and the Expansion of Education (2016, background): “Becker and Woessmann (2009) suggest that due to the influence of the Protestant Reformation, literacy, as a by-product of Protestantism, tended to spread almost concentrically around Wittenberg.”