This chapter surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history,
covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly …

Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions
and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an …

This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic
development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the …

This paper presents a novel study examining the effect of a property rights law reform that
legalized land transfers on land quality. Using unique Chinese county‐level land erosion …

I study the relationship between land concentration and the expansion of state education in
19C England. Using a broad range of education measures for 40 counties and 1,387 School …

Abstract We test Le Play's (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to
France's early fertility decline. In 1793, a series of inheritance reforms abolished local …

How do radical reforms shape economic development over time? In 1790, the French
Constituent Assembly overhauled the kingdom's organization to establish new local capitals …

First, in Table A. 1, I regress the share of refractory clergy on all baseline and additional
controls (one by one) to check if these are correlated with religiosity. Among the baseline …

Can religiosity affect the emergence and migration patterns of scientists? We focus on 19th-
century France, a period in which the Catholic Church had embraced a particularly …

By refining the moral code and enforcing it through the new 'mendicant'orders, the Church of
the 13th century laid the cognitive, interpersonal, and institutional groundwork for large …