The Protestant Ethic Reexamined: Calvinism and Industrialization

Abstract

Can cultural differences affect economic change? Max Weber famously argued that ascetic Protestants’ religious commitments—specifically their work ethic—inspired them to develop capitalist economic systems conducive to rapid economic change. Yet today, scholars continue to debate the empirical validity of Weber’s claims, which address a vibrant literature in political economy on the relationship between culture and economic change. We revisit the link between religion and economic change in Reformed Europe. To do so, we leverage a quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where certain regions had Reformed Protestant beliefs imposed on them by local authorities during the Swiss Reformation, while other regions remained Catholic. Using 19th-century Swiss census data, we perform a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design to test Weber’s hypothesis and find that the Swiss Protestants in the Canton of Vaud industrialized faster than their Catholic neighbors in Fribourg.