Reading, writing, and religion: Institutions and human capital formation

Abstract

a b s t r a c t Chaudhary, Latika, and Rubin, Jared-Reading, writing, and religion: Institutions and human capital formationIn this paper, we empirically test the role that religious and political institutions play in the accumulation of human capital. Using a new data set on literacy in colonial India, we find that Muslim literacy is negatively correlated with the proportion of Muslims in the district, although we find no similar result for Hindu literacy. We employ a theoretical model which suggests that districts which experienced a more recent collapse of Muslim political authority had more powerful and better funded religious authorities, who established religious schools which were less effective at promoting literacy on the margin than state schools. We test this hypothesis econometrically, finding that the period of Muslim political collapse has a statistically significant effect on Muslim literacy while controlling for it eliminates the significance of the proportion of Muslims on Muslim literacy. This suggests that the ''long hand of history" has played some role in subsequent differences in human capital formation through the persistence of institutions discouraging literacy. Journal of Comparative Economics 39 (1) (2011) 17-33. Scripps College,

The political economy of mass printing: Legitimacy and technological change in the Ottoman Empire

“…5 This is consistent with the recent economic approaches to the history of Muslim and Middle Eastern societies and empirical analysis of the relationship between Islam and democracy. See, for example, Greif (2002Greif ( , 2006, Iannaccone and Berman (2006), Platteau (2008), Kuran (2010, Rubin (2011a), Potrafke (2012) and Chaudhary and Rubin (2011). 6 For more on the role that religious authorities have played in legitimizing the state in the Islamic and Christian worlds, see Mann (1986), Greif (2002Greif ( , 2006Greif ( , 2010, Platteau (2008) Greif and Tadelis (2010), Rubin (2011a), and Chaudhary and Rubin (2011).…”

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“…On the contrary, as α increases, diminishing returns kick in, thereby reducing the attractiveness of increasing G. Hence, ∂G * ∂α is either negative or positive, depending on which effect is stronger. In order to derive a comparative static result that sheds light on the case of the Princely States, we assume that G * is relatively small and hence marginal 16 It is straightforward to see that the second-order condition holds, as…”

“…More recently, economists have made all sorts of connections mapping some aspect of religion to economic development. See, for instance, Greif (1994Greif ( , 2006, Grier (1997), Barro and McCleary (2003), Guiso et al (2003), Botticini andEckstein (2005, 2007), Noland (2005), Arruñada (2010), Rubin (2011), Kuran (2011), Spenkuch (2011), Jha (2013), Bhalotra et al (2014), Cantoni (2014), Greif and Rubin (2015), and Iyigun (2015).…”

“…That is, religious laws and authorities place constraints on the choice sets of political authorities, and these constraints are manifested in different ways depending on the institutional past. In particular, comparative works show how different institutional relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim regions led to long-run differences in financial institutions and instruments (Kuran 2005(Kuran , 2011Rubin 2010), reaction to technology (Coşgel et al 2012a(Coşgel et al , 2012b, trade institutions (Greif 1994(Greif , 2006, and laws (Rubin 2011). …”

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