This paper examines how network ties between local social leaders influenced the diffusion of mass protests in an autocracy. We focus on the Protestant Church and the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany. To quantify the role of leader networks in protest diffusion, we compile biographical...

In 1968, young people grew up in an atmosphere of strong dissatisfaction and distrust against the status quo. We show that higher exposure to protests in 1968 leads to higher dissatisfaction toward national governments and raises the probability of voting for populist parties. Consistently with...

Can weakened religiosity lead to the rise of totalitarianism? The Nazi Party set itself up as a political religion, emphasizing redemption, sacrifice, rituals, and communal spirit. This had a major impact on its success: Where the Christian Church only had shallow roots, the Nazis received...

This paper studies the impact of the Protestant Reformation on wealth distribution and inequality in confessionally divided Germany, between 1400 and 1800. The Reformation expanded social welfare, but provided it in a particularistic way to insiders only. This gave Protestantism an ambiguous...

This article re-examines the Weber Thesis or hypothesis which assumes an association between Protestantism, above all Calvinism, and the spirit and activity of modern capitalism. It suggests that certain antecedents as well as opposing versions precede the Weber Thesis. These are termed positive...

The Protestant missionaries started the trend to educate women in the 19th century China, paving Chinese women’s way into higher education and professional services. Using various measures of Protestant activities by 1920 and a hand-collected dataset of college students from 1928-1938, we show...

Can weakened religiosity lead to the rise of totalitarianism? The Nazi Party set itself up as a political religion, emphasizing redemption, sacrifice, rituals, and communal spirit. This had a major impact on its success: Where the Christian Church only had shallow roots, the Nazis received...

How do economic costs affect religious choices, and how do religious institutions adapt to economic realities? We study the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) church in Sub-Saharan Africa, which prohibits production of tobacco, coffee, and tea, creating salient opportunity costs for potential members...

Can citizen-led protests lead to meaningful economic redistribution and nudge governments to increase redistributive efforts of fiscal resources? We study the effects of protests on fiscal redistribution using evidence from Nigeria. We digitized twenty-six years of public finance data from 1988...

A country's culture influences its economic growth, which in turn influences its international position. Confucian heritage appears to be the common factor explaining the rapid economic growth of East Asian countries, including China's meteoric rise in recent years. Ironically, Confucianism has...

We investigate the rise of the religious right in the context of the Moral Majority and Jimmy Carter, the first Evangelical President. During Carter's Presidency, the Moral Majority, an Evangelical group headed by televangelist Jerry Falwell, turned against the incumbent Carter, a Democrat, and...

Using Facebook's release in a given language as an exogenous source of variation in access to social media where the language is spoken, we show that Facebook has had a significant and sizable positive impact on citizen protests. By exploiting variation in a large sample of countries during...

We investigate if an individual manager’s preferences affect corporate decisions. Specifically, we consider the effects of religion since it is an important force shaping individual preferences. We hand-collect data on the religious affiliations of CEOs and find that firms with Catholic CEOs...

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...

During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and whether other education motives were involved as well. We employ a historical data set from...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

Introductions. Money and its inventions: theoretical considerations ; England in the late sixteenth century ; English developments, 1584-1692 -- The Atlantic. Before 1630: harvesters of money ; The Puritan exodus, 1629-1640: general features ; Massachusetts takes the monetary lead, 1630-1640 ; A...

Die Aufdeckung manipulierter Abgaswerte bei Dieselautos des Herstellers Volkswagen (VW) durch die amerikanischen Behörden im Jahr 2015 brachte einen der größten Unternehmensskandale Deutschlands zutage. Dieser Skandal blieb nicht ohne Konsequenzen. Martin Winterkorn trat von seinem Amt als...

We study the causal impact of religiosity through a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program delivered to thousands of ultra-poor Filipino households. Six months after the program ended, treated households have higher religiosity and...

We revisit Max Weber's hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber's Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late nineteenth-century Prussia we reject Weber's suggestion that Protestantism...