This paper uses a historical setting to study when religion can be a barrier to the diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I focus on 19th-century Catholicism and analyze a crucial phase of modern economic growth, the Second Industrial Revolution...

The organization of the Prussian school system still affects the German education system of today. Against the background of end-of-nineteenth-Prussia this thesis analyzes how education funding emerges in a federal system and how it affects prosperity and nation building in a setting of...