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 Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
3837.
Length: 2008 pages Date of creation: Nov 2008 Date of revision: Publication status: published in: Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2008, 110 (4), 777–805 Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3837