Landownership Concentration and the Expansion of Education
68 Pages Posted: 14 Nov 2013
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Landownership Concentration and the Expansion of Education
Landownership Concentration and the Expansion of Education
Date Written: November 2013
Abstract
This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration, a proxy for the institution of serfdom, has a negative effect on schooling. This effect diminishes substantially towards the end of the century. Causality of this relationship is confirmed by introducing soil texture to identify exogenous farm-size variation. Panel estimates further rule out unobserved heterogeneity. We present several robustness checks which shed some light on possible mechanisms.
Keywords: Education, Institutions, Land concentration, Peasants' emancipation, Prussian economic history, Serfdom
JEL Classification: I25, N33, O43, Q15
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation