TY - RPRT AU - Castelló-Climent, Amparo AU - Chaudhary, Latika AU - Mukhopadhyay, Abhiroop TI - Tertiary Education and Prosperity: Catholic Missionaries to Luminosity in India PY - 2015/Oct/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 9441 UR - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp9441 AB - This paper estimates the causal impact of tertiary education on luminosity across Indian districts. We address the potential endogeneity of tertiary education using the location of Catholic missionaries in 1911 as an instrument for current tertiary education. We find Catholic missionaries have a large and positive impact on tertiary education. Catholics were not at the forefront of tertiary education in colonial India, but they established many high quality colleges following Indian independence. Controlling for a rich set of geographical and historical characteristics, we find a positive causal effect of tertiary education on development, as measured by light density at night. The findings are robust to different measures of development, and are not driven by alternative channels through which missionaries could impact current income. KW - subregional analysis KW - Catholic missionaries KW - human capital ER -