%0 Report
        %A Becker, Sascha O.
%A Woessmann, Ludger
        %T Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia
        %D 2008
        %8 2008 Nov
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 3837
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp3837
        %X Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, 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.
        %K Protestantism
%K education
%K gender gap