Predestination and the Protestant ethic

This paper shows an equivalence result between the utility functions of secularagents who abide by a moral obligation to accumulate wealth and those of religiousagents who believe that salvation is immutable and preordained by God. Thisresult formalizes Weber's renowned thesis on the connection between the worldlyasceticism of Protestants and the religious premises of Calvinism. Furthermore,ongoing economies are often modeled with preference relations such as "Keeping upwith the Joneses" which are not associated with religion. Our results relate thesesecular economies of today and economies of the past shaped by religious ideas.

The economic effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber hypothesis in the German Lands

Many theories, most famously Max Weber s essay on the Protestant ethic, have hypothesizedthat Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerablereligious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, theGerman Lands of the Holy Roman Empire present an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis.Using population figures in a dataset comprising 272 cities in the years 1300 1900, I find no effectsof Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a varietyof controls, and does not appear to depend on data selection or small sample size. In addition,Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development.I also analyze the endogeneity of religious choice; instrumental variables estimates ofthe effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.

[Voyage en Italie : 1824-1830]. , Cimetière hors la Ville : [plan d'ensemble, plan du portique d'entrée] : [dessin] / h. L. [Henri Labrouste]

Référence bibliographique : Weigert, 203

Meaux, 7/9/19, cimetière de Chambry, discours de M. Noulens [de gauche à droite MM. Gaston Menier et Jacques Dumesnil, les évêques Marbeau et Ginisty] : [photographie de presse] / [Agence Rol]

Référence bibliographique : Rol, 55821