An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Political Economy.

Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History*

“…For example, Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison (2002) hypothesize that the diffusion of the Reformation might have been facilitated in societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth. This hypothesis is explicitly aimed at the diffusion across countries, though, and may be less relevant for the diffusion within Prussia.…”

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

“…Iyigun's thesis is complementary to the one proposed in this paper, as both help explain the timing of the Reformation, though the present argument also helps explain the spatial pattern of the Reformation. Ekelund, Hébert andTollison (2002, 2008) also present a complementary hypothesis which views the Church as a discriminating monopolist that encouraged entry by "rival firms". They have difficulty explaining the timing of the Reformation (and the failure of previous reformers), but the micro-mechanisms they suggest underscore an important aspect of the Reformers' motivations.…”

Causes and consequences of the Protestant Reformation

“…5). Gill (1998) andRubin (2016) (Ekelund, Hébert, Tollison 2002, 2006. Certainly, this was the depiction of Central Europe before the Reformation favored by earlier generations of historians (Huizinga 1924;Lortz 1968;Ozment 1980).…”