This paper provides a documentation of the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for 19th-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816-1901, with much...

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of...

The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with...

This article describes the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a public use county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for nineteenth-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816--1901. These...

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...

Across Prussian counties and towns, Protestantism led to more schooling already in 1816, before the Industrial Revolution. This supports a human capital theory of Protestant economic history and rules out a Weberian explanation of Protestant education just resulting from industrialization.

The interaction between investment in children’s education and parental fertility is crucial in recent theories of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth. This paper contributes to the literature on the child quantity–quality trade-off with new county-level...

Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the Habsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in local public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the...

We model the effect of Protestant vs. Catholic denomination in an economic theory of suicide, accounting for differences in religious-community integration, views about man’s impact on God’s grace, and the possibility of confessing sins. We test the theory using a unique micro-regional...