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.

Europe experienced a "Commercial Revolution" in the late Middle Ages. We present new data that document this transformation using information on city incorporation and market establishments. We test whether universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the consequences of their exogenous establishment in Germany following the Papal Schism in 1378. The trend rate of market establishment breaks upward when the first German university was established; this break is greatest where the distance to a university shrank most. We argue that the link between universities and greater economic activity involved the development of formal legal and administrative institutions.

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.