Sascha Becker
German economic historian, professor at Monash University and University of Warwick. With Ludger Woessmann (Munich/ifo), co-author of Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2009), the most-cited modern empirical test of the Weber thesis. Their work on county-level 19th-century Prussian data, exploiting distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism, found that Protestant counties were richer than Catholic ones — but that the channel was literacy and education (Protestant insistence on Bible-reading drove human-capital accumulation) rather than the Weberian work-ethic disposition. The paper is a partial revival (Weber’s empirical correlation survives) and a refutation (Weber’s mechanism does not).
Becker’s broader research program covers historical political economy, religion and human capital, and applied micro-econometrics with historical data. He has been an editor of journals in economic history and applied econometrics.
Associated positions
Section titled “Associated positions”- The Protestant ethic (IR) — the principal modern empirical-revival voice (with Woessmann), and simultaneously the principal voice for reinterpreting the Weber correlation as a human-capital effect.
Key works
Section titled “Key works”- With Ludger Woessmann: “Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2009).
- With Erik Hornung and Ludger Woessmann: “Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution” (American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2011).
- With Cinnirella, Hornung, & Woessmann: various papers on historical political economy of education and religion.