Can’t See the Forest for the IVs Re-examining the Cistercian “Pre-reformation Roots of the Protestant Ethic”

I re-examine the claim made by Andersen, Bentzen, Dalgaard, and Sharp that the work ethic of the Cistercian order instigated the kind of cultural change attributed to Protestantism by Max Weber. Following a critical discussion of their historical and theoretical arguments, as well as an assessment of the original study design, I reconsider and expand upon their analyses of the positive associations between past Cistercian presence and early modern economic development as well as contemporary values. Theories about the historical origins of economic development can often only be tested indirectly. Moreover, the theories are often insufficient to deduce the precise specification of statistical models or to choose among competing ways to measure a theoretical construct with available historical data. For this reason, I conduct a systematic robustness check that takes into account a wide range of plausible model specifications. While the correlation between Cistercians and population growth remains robust, all models attempting to identify a causal effect either rely on specific and hard-to-justify choices concerning the operationalization of central constructs or fail to provide strong confirmatory evidence. Furthermore, additional analyses investigating the mediation effect of contemporary value orientations on economic indicators contradict the proposed mechanism. The text concludes by offering recommendations on how to systematically study the cultural and economic impact of Christian orders.