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Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia

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Author Info
Sascha O. Becker ()
Ludger Woessmann ()

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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.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by CESifo Group Munich in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number CESifo Working Paper No. 2414.

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Date of creation: 2008
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Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2414

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Related research
Keywords: gender gap; education; Protestantism;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
N33 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Income, and Wealth - - - Europe: Pre-1913
Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion

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This page was last updated on 2009-11-3.

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