Education and religious participation: city-level evidence from Germany’s secularization period 1890–1930

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct Valuable comments were kindly provided by the editor, five anonymous referees, Oliver Falck, David Figlio, Jared Rubin, and seminar participants at Stanford, Gothenburg, Hong Kong UST, Modena, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Umeå, the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, the CAGE/CEPR Conference on “Long-Run Growth: Unified Growth Theory and Economic History” at Warwick, the CAS conference on “The Long Shadow of History” in Munich, the CEPR Economic History Symposium in Perugia, the CESifo Economics of Education area meeting in Munich, the European Economic Association in Gothenburg, the Economic History Society in Warwick, the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture at Chapman University, the German Economic Association in Hamburg, the Ammersee workshop “Natural Experiments and Controlled Field Studies”, the Education Committee of the German Economic Association in Wuppertal, and the workshop “Political Economy, Economic History, and Religion” at WZB Berlin. We are grateful to Lucian Hölscher for providing the Sacrament Statistics, to Christoph Albert, Laurenz Detsch, and Andreas Ferrara for capable research assistance, and to the Pact for Research and Innovation of the Leibniz Association for partial financial support. B Sascha O. Becker [email protected] Markus Nagler [email protected] Ludger Woessmann [email protected] 1 Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK 2 Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE), Coventry CV4 7AL, UK 3 Ifo Institute, Poschingerstr. 5, 81679 Munich, Germany 4 CESifo, Poschingerstr. 5, 81679 Munich, Germany 5 ROA, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands 6 CEPR, London, UK 7 IZA, Bonn, Germany 8 Department of Economics, University of Munich, Germany