We received substantive comments during various seminar presentations. Discussions with and comments from Davide Cantoni, Peter Egger, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Monika Piazzesi, Martin Schneider, Holger Sieg, and two anonymous referees were very fruitful. Erik Hornung and Clemens König provided capable research assistance.

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Abstract

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby 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.

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Volume110, Issue4

Special Issue:Economics of Education and Human‐capital Accumulation

December 2008

Pages 777-805

Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-century Prussia^*

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Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-century Prussia*

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Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-century Prussia^*