Under which conditions does religion affect educational outcomes?

Abstract

This paper examines under which conditions religious denomination affects public spending on schooling and educational performance. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of public school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of conscripts , and results from political referenda to capture conservative or progressive values. Although Catholic districts show on average significantly lower educational performance and spend less on primary schooling than Protestant districts, Catholicism is harmful only in a conservative milieu. We also exploit information on absenteeism of pupils from school to separate provision of schooling from use of schooling. Abstract This paper examines under which conditions religious denomination affects public spending on schooling and educational performance. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of public school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of conscripts , and results from political referenda to capture conservative or progressive values. Although Catholic districts show on average significantly lower educational performance and spend less on primary schooling than Protestant districts, Catholicism is harmful only in a conservative milieu. We also exploit information on absenteeism of pupils from school to separate provision of schooling from use of schooling.

Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation

“…Probit and instrumental variable regressions suggest that cities which adopted printing early were much more likely to accept the Reformation. I find that in the European nations where some variation in religious choice existed, cities that were early print adopters were 52.1 percentage points more , 2009Boppart et al 2010) played a significant role in the subsequent economic development of Europe and "the West".…”

Protestantism and Education: Reading (The Bible) and Other Skills

“…Becker and Woessmann (2010) provide evidence for preindustrialization Prussia (the year 1816) that both the density of primary schools and primary school enrollment were higher in Protestant regions 1 . In a similar vein, Boppart et al (2013) show that, on average, Protestant regions in nineteenth‐century Switzerland were associated with higher school expenditure and higher educational performance 2…”

“…Under the assumption that spillover effects are not too large, theoretical considerations provide us with a structural approach where we estimate the impact of Protestantism on reading skills while controlling for other cognitive skills, like math capability. As in Boppart et al (2013), we employ analogously to Becker and Woessmann (2009, 2010) an instrumentation strategy which relates religious denomination in a district to its distance to the centers of Protestantism in Switzerland (Zurich and Geneva) while at the same time controlling for distance to bigger cities in general (which had no important effect on cognitive skills).…”

Printing and Protestants: Reforming the Economics of the Reformation

“…A more complete analysis of the impact of printing and its role in the interplay between political and religious authorities, therefore, should be comparative in nature, as the Ottoman anti-printing policy provides a "control experiment" for understanding the economic, political, and religious trajectory of a society where the introduction of the press was delayed for nearly three centuries. or the Reformation (Becker and Wößmann 2008, 2009Boppart et al 2010) have played a significant role in the subsequent economic development of Europe and "the West". The present study suggests that any linkages between the press or the Reformation and economic growth must be taken with extreme caution.…”