Jeanet Sinding Bentzen

Pre-Reformation Roots of the Protestant Ethic

We hypothesize that cultural appreciation of hard work and thrift,the Protestant ethic according to Max Weber,had a pre-Reformation origin.The proximate source of these values was,according to the proposed theory,the Catholic Order of Cistercians.In support,we first document an impact from the Order on growth within the epicenter of the industrial revolution;English counties that were more exposed to Cistercian monasteries experienced faster productivity growth from the 13th century onwards. Consistent with a cultural influence,this impact is also found after the monasteries were dissolved in the 1530s.Second,we find that the values emphasized by Weber are relatively more pervasive in European regions where Cistercian monasteries were located historically,and that the legacy of the Cistercianscan be detected inpresent-day employment rates across European sub-regions.

Origins of Religiousness: The Role of Natural Disasters

Across 800 regions of the World, this research shows that people are more religious when living in regions that are more frequently razed by natural disasters. This is in line with psychological theory stressing that religious people tend to cope with adverse life events by seeking comfort in their religion or searching for a reason for the event; for instance that the event was an act of God. This is termed religious coping. Natural disasters are a source for adverse life events, and thus one way to interpret my findings is by way of religious coping. The results are robust to various measures of religiousness, and to inclusion of country fixed effects, income, education, demographics, religious denominations, and other climatic and geographic features. The results hold within Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, and across continents. To eliminate bias from omitted variables and selection (perhaps religious people are less likely to move out of disaster areas as they see the disaster as an act of God), I further show that second generation immigrants whose mothers descend from natural disaster areas, are more religious than their counterparts with ancestors from calmer areas. Why should economists care? Evidence suggests that religiousness influences economic outcomes (e.g., McCleary & Barro (2003), Iannaccone (1998)).

Lightning, IT Diffusion and Economic Growth Across US States

Empirically, a higher frequency of lightning strikes is associated with slower growth in labor productivity across the 48 contiguous US states after 1990; before 1990 there is no correlation between growth and lightning. Other climate variables (e.g., temperature, rainfall and tornadoes) do not conform to this pattern. A viable explanation is that lightning influences IT diffusion. By causing voltage spikes and dips, a higher frequency of ground strikes leads to damaged digital equipment and thus higher IT user costs. Accordingly, the flash density (strikes per square km per year) should adversely affect the speed of IT diffusion. We find that lightning indeed seems to have slowed IT diffusion, conditional on standard controls. Hence, an increasing macroeconomic sensitivity to lightning may be due to the increasing importance of digital technologies for the growth process.

The Timing of Industrialization Across Countries

We develop a measure of the timing of industrialization, comparable across 149 countries. Defining the year of industrial transition as the year in which employment in industry exceeded that in agriculture, we identify 67 countries that industrialized between 1801 and 2005 and 82 countries that had not yet industrialized by 2005. We crossvalidate the data using anecdotal evidence from historians and by showing that, in a subset of countries, industrial production per capita surges around the year of industrialization. We then use the measure to investigate existing theories of industrialization. First, we find that an early transition is associated with higher income today. Second, the industrial transition is closely linked with the fertility transition. Third, early- and late-industrializers have rather similar levels of income, human capital, and structural composition. Fourth, late-comers differ from early-industrializers in terms of being more open to trade, having larger service shares, industrializing faster, experiencing higher growth rates of GDP per capita and schooling, and last by being more heterogenous along several dimensions.

On the Impact of Digital Technologies on Corruption: Evidence from U.S. States and Across Countries

We hypothesize that the spread of the Internet has reduced corruption, chiefly through two mechanisms. First, the Internet facilitates the dissemination of information about corrupt behavior, which raises the detection risks to shady bureaucrats and politicians. Second, the Internet has reduced the interface between bureaucrats and the public. Using cross-country data and data for the U.S. states, we test this hypothesis. Data spans the period during which the Internet has been in operation. In order to address the potential endogeneity problem, we develop a novel identification strategy for Internet diffusion. Digital equipment is highly sensitive to power disruption: it leads to equipment failure and damage. Even very short disruptions (less than 1/60th of a second) can have such consequences. Accordingly, more frequent power failures will increase the user cost of IT capital; either directly, through depreciation, or indirectly, through the costs of protective devises. Ceteris paribus, we expect that higher IT user costs will lower the speed of Internet diffusion. A natural phenomenon which causes a major part of annual power disruptions globally is lightning activity. Lightning therefore provides exogenous variation in the user cost of IT capital. Based on global satellite data from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), we construct lightning density data for a large cross section of countries and for the U.S. states. We demonstrate that the lightning density variable is a strong instrument for changes in Internet penetration; and we proceed to show that the spread of the Internet has reduced the extent of corruption across the globe and across the U.S. The size of the impact is economically and statistically significant.