Borders of Belief: Protestantism and Social Mobility

Max Weber linked Protestant prosperity to a distinctive work ethic and thrift. More recent research emphasizes instead the role of human-capital formation. We show that Protestantism also causally promoted social mobility. Studying the Netherlands, we instrument municipal Protestant share with sixteenth-century archdiocesan boundaries that shaped Catholic enforcement in the Counter-Reformation. Municipalities with higher instrumented Protestant presence exhibited greater intergenerational mobility, higher fiscal capacity, and better material living standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We trace mobility over more than three hundred years, and find that the Protestant mobility advantage was already visible in the centuries before industrialization. Evaluating competing channels within a unified empirical framework, we find that social mobility emerges as the strongest correlate of development among the canonical channels tested. The results provide further evidence of Protestantism's legacy for the cultural and institutional foundations of modern growth.