Davide Cantoni

Italian economic historian, professor at LMU Munich. His The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2015) is the most consequential empirical refutation of the strong-form Weber thesis. Using population data for 272 German cities from 1300 to 1900 — a near-ideal setting given the Holy Roman Empire’s religious heterogeneity — Cantoni finds no statistically discernible effect of Protestantism on economic growth, with results precisely estimated and robust to alternative specifications and controls.

The paper is widely treated as the definitive empirical word on Weber-as-direct-cause-of-economic-growth in the German case. Subsequent revival attempts (Becker-Woessmann’s literacy channel) accept Cantoni’s null on the Weberian work-ethic mechanism and locate the Protestant economic advantage in human-capital channels instead.

Cantoni’s broader research program covers historical political economy, religion, and education, including extensive work on the Reformation’s political-economy effects and on more recent topics in Chinese political economy.

Associated positions

• The Protestant ethic (IR) — the principal empirical refutation of the strong-form thesis.

Key works

• “The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands” (JEEA, 2015).
• With Dittmar and Yuchtman: “Religious Competition and Reallocation: The Political Economy of Secularization in the Protestant Reformation” (QJE, 2018).
• Multiple papers on the political economy of the Reformation, on protests and repression in modern China, and on religious competition.