Economic History Seminar

Du 19/06/2024 de 12:00 à 13:30

R1.15

KOEHLER-DERRICK Gabriel ()

Religious Sacraments and Local Development: Evidence from Colonial Ireland

In this paper we introduce an important corollary to the widely accepted claim that the prevalence of certain religious institutions drives economic development: the repression of religious institutions can inhibit local levels of development. We test this claim in colonial Ireland, where a series of laws, known collectively as the Penal Laws, suppressed the Catholic Church and everyday religious practice for more than 150 years. Building on insights from demography on the importance of age heaping, we introduce a novel measure, “spousal heaping,” that records the coincidence of a husband and wife reporting a heaped age, and using the full 1901 population census show that Catholic spouses were far more likely to report heaped ages than non-Catholics. We argue that disparities in spousal heaping were driven by the active repression of Catholic priests who played a key role in administering two sacraments: baptism and confirmation, which dramatically reduced the prevalence of recorded ages for Catholics, but not Protestants, until the introduction of the Civil Registry in 1864.