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Max Weber and the First World War: Protestant and Catholic living standards in Germany, 1915–1919

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

MATTHIAS BLUM  and
MATTHIAS STREBEL
MATTHIAS BLUM*
Affiliation:
Queen´s Management School, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, UK
MATTHIAS STREBEL*
Affiliation:
Wissenschaftszentrum Weihenstephan, Technische Universität München, Freising, Germany
*
*Email: [email protected]
**Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

We assess informal institutions of Protestants and Catholics by investigating their economic resilience in a natural experiment. The First World War constitutes an exogenous shock to living standards since the duration and intensity of the war exceeded all expectations. We assess the ability of Protestant and Catholic communities to cope with increasing food prices and wartime black markets. Literature based on Weber (1904, 1905) suggests that Protestants must be more resilient than their Catholic peers. Using individual height data on some 2,800 Germans to assess levels of malnutrition during the war, we find that living standards for both Protestants and Catholics declined; however, the decrease of Catholics’ height was disproportionately large. Our empirical analysis finds a large statistically significant difference between Protestants and Catholics for the 1915–19 birth cohort, and we argue that this height gap cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background and fertility alone.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 699 - 719
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2016 

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