Davide Cantoni

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Many theories, most famously Max Weber's essay on the 'Protestant ethic,' have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands of the Holy Roman Empire present an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures in a dataset comprising 276 cities in the years 1300-1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a variety of 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 of the effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.

The French Revolution of 1789 had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the legal and economic barriers that had protected the nobility, clergy, guilds, and urban oligarchies and established the principle of equality before the law. The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. Our interpretation is that the Revolution destroyed (the institutional underpinnings of) the power of oligarchies and elites opposed to economic change; combined with the arrival of new economic and industrial opportunities in the second half of the 19th century, this helped pave the way for future economic growth. The evidence does not provide any support for several other views, most notably, that evolved institutions are inherently superior to those ‘designed;’ that institutions must be ‘appropriate’ and cannot be ‘transplanted;’ and that the civil code and other French institutions have adverse economic effects.

This paper examines the impact of television on consumption behavior. We focus on a 'natural experiment,' in which differential access to Western television in former East Germany was determined by geographic features. Based surveys from the early 1990s, we find that individuals less exposed to Western TV reported significantly lower importance to consumerist values. Using data from the German income and expenditure survey (EVS), we observe that soon after 1990 those individuals in East Germany that previously lacked access to Western television consumed significantly less goods with high intensity of advertisement.

Europe experienced a 'Commercial Revolution' in the late Middle Ages, with urbanization and trade expanding across the continent. We present newly-collected evidence on the Commercial Revolution: a comprehensive dataset encompassing 2,256 incorporated cities in Germany, indicating their dates of incorporation and the granting of market rights. We then use this information to test whether formal legal institutions supported market establishment. We argue that the universities of medieval Europe, which developed the continent's legal systems and trained the individuals who served in them, contributed to the development of formal legal institutions. We then exploit the arguably exogenous creation of universities in Germany following the Papal Schism to test for a causal relationship between legal institutions and market establishment. Our findings suggest that university establishment and legal development significantly increased economic activity.