Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth‐century Prussia*
利用1816年普鲁士人口普查数据，研究发现新教徒比例越高，基础教育中的性别差距越小，且这一效应在考虑宗教改革发源地距离的外生变化后依然成立。
Abstract Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby evoking a surge of building girls' schools in Protestant areas. Using county‐ and town‐level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county's or town's distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.