new media, markets, and institutional change: evidence from the

New Media, Markets, and Religious Change:Evidence from the Protestant Reformation

Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold∗

Version 0.1 – Preliminary & Incomplete DraftPlease Do Not Circulate

March 26, 2015

Abstract

Printing was the new media of the European Renaissance. During the Protes-tant Reformation of the early 1500s, religious reformers employed print media todisseminate their ideas. We construct a new measure of religious content in themedia using data on all known books and pamphlets printed in German-speakingEurope 1450-1600. We apply the measure to study the diffusion of the ideas ofthe Reformation across cities and time. At the city level, we find that Protestantcontent was more likely to be produced and was produced in greater quantity inmedia markets served by more competing firms. The extent of market competi-tion mattered differentially more for the diffusion of Protestant media where citygovernments had the least legal and institutional autonomy from feudal lords. Wedocument the relationship between media market competition and religious changedirectly and using the timing of the deaths of individual printers to isolate plausiblyexogenous variation in city-level competition. We document that cities with highlevels of exposure to Protestant ideas, and where media market competition wasmore intense, were more likely to adopt the institutions of the Reformation usingnew data on municipal laws of the 1500s.

∗Dittmar: London School of Economics. Email: [email protected]. Seabold: AmericanUniversity. Email: [email protected]. We thank Russ Gasdia for research assistance, discussion,and suggestions. We thank workshop participants at UCL, Barcelona GSE, Chicago Booth, and Sussex.Noam Yuchtman, Suresh Naidu, Davide Cantoni, and Ralf Meisenzahl provided valuable feedback.Dittmar acknowledges support through the Deutsche Bank Membership at the Institute for AdvancedStudy (Princeton, NJ) and the National Science Foundation.

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1 Introduction

How do revolutionary innovations in information technology drive social change? The

use of internet-based communications technologies in contemporary social movements

such as the so-called Color Revolutions, Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street has raised

questions about the role of new media in the diffusion of ideas and institutional change.

It is natural to wonder how much the diffusion of radical ideas depends on technology,

what role competition in media markets plays, and whether the implications of new

technologies and of competition depend on the initial institutional conditions.

History provides unparalleled evidence on the relationship between the diffusion of

radical ideas, media market competition, and institutional change. This research uses

microdata data on all known books and pamphlets printed 1454-1600 to study the role

of new media and market competition in one of the most important transformations in

European society – the Protestant Reformation in central Europe.

The new media used in the Protestant Reformation were print media. The print-

ing press was invented in Mainz, Germany around 1454. Between 1454 and the early

1500s the technology spread to cities across Europe where it was adopted by firms.1

Book prices fell by over 95% between the 1450s and the early 1500s. In 1517, Martin

Luther circulated a set of theses criticizing Church corruption and calling for a reform

of Church practices. Luther was a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg,

in Northeast Germany. In a matter of months, Luther’s ideas were reprinted in several

cities. Over the subsequent years, Protestant thinkers disseminated their ideas in the

new media across German-speaking Europe and a mass movement for reform emerged.

There is a debate over the role of the media in the diffusion of the Reformation. The

Reformation was the first mass movement to make systematic use of the new media and

the first successful, large scale challenge to the quasi-monopoly of the Catholic church in

Western Europe [Edwards, 1994]. Many historians argue that print media were critical to

the diffusion and success of the Reformation [Ozment, 1980, Brady, 2009]. A considerable

body of historical research suggests print media was indispensible – “No printing, no

Reformation” in Bernd Moeller’s famous aphorism. But the Reformation diffused in a

world with relatively low literacy, leading some scholars to emphasize the role of oral and

visual communication and to suggest that the conventional case for the importance of

print media is oversold [Scribner, 1994].2

1See Dittmar [2011] for a discussion of the diffusion process, including evidence that the technologydiffused from Mainz rather than from other centers.

2A general consensus among historians holds that print media was important despite the fact thatliteracy levels were low [Edwards, 1994]. Print media was read aloud and the ideas transmitted in print

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The debate over the role of the media in the Reformation reflects three challenges. The

first challenge is that no existing data or research systematically documents the diffusion

of Protestant ideas in the media in quantitative terms. The reason the diffusion of the

Reformation in the media has not been documented quantitatively is that the existing

data on print media are large, high-dimensional, and do not systematically categorize

books or authors by religion.3 The second challenge is that systematic evidence on firms

competing in media markets is required to study whether and how the economics of media

industries explain diffusion. No previous research has constructed systematic evidence on

firms or studied the role of competition in the diffusion of content.4 The third challenge

concerns cause and effect. To study how variations in competition impacted the diffusion

of content, and how competition and content contributed to institutional change, we need

to isolate sources of plausibly exogenous variation.

This research addresses these challenges with three main contributions. First, we

assemble firm-level panel data on every known book and pamphlet printed in German-

speaking Europe 1454-1600 and construct a measure of religious content in the media

using estimators for high dimensional data. Second, we document how variations in

media market competition on the eve of the Reformation predict the diffusion of Protes-

tant ideas and subsequent institutional change. Here we show that variations in market

competition mattered differentially more in cities where formal political freedom was ex

ante most constrained. Third, we show that the relationship between competition and

the diffusion of the Reformation holds when we study plausibly exogenous variation in

market competition induced by (i) the timing of the deaths of master printers and/or (ii)

lagged measures of market competition less likely to embody selective entry.

The first contribution of this research is to construct a new, high frequency measure

of religious content in print media at the city and firm levels. The research obtains this

measure of content by assembling new data on all known books and pamphlets printed

in German-speaking Europe and using estimators for high-dimensional data to classify

content. The data consist of 110,000+ publications printed in 200+ cities 1454-1600. The

research uses historical sources to identify 450+ leading Protestant and Catholic authors

– authors responsible for 18% of the media printed in Germany 1450-1600. The research

were further circulated in sermons and conversations. On literacy and the impact of print media seeBrady [2009] and Scribner [1994] and discussion below.

3For example, the Universal Short Title Catalogue [of St. Andrews, 2012] which we discuss belowsimply classifies book subject matter as “religious” or not. The same is true in the Das Verzeichnis derim deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD 16) catalog. The historyliterature has to date examined small subsets of the existing data. For example, Edwards [1994] studies asample of pamphlets from the first half of the 1500s that comprises 3,183 pamphlets authored by MartinLuther and 1,763 authored by Catholic activists.

4The exception is Dittmar (2015), on which we build and which is discussed below.

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uses statistical models for high-dimensional data to identify the language characteristic

of Protestant and Catholic authors in long, historical book titles.5 We use these models

to generate a measure of the religious content of print media at the author, firm, and

city level that captures how similar the language of their media output is to the language

of known Protestant and Catholic writers.6 A large literature uses high-dimensional

estimation techniques to document the diffusion of ideas in the internet-based social

media such as twitter “tweets” [Pak and Paroubek, 2010, Bollen et al., 2011, Taddy,

2013c]. This research takes these estimators to historical data. In contrast to our high

frequency city-level measure of content in the media, previous work has relied on measures

of religious belief observed centuries after the Reformation [Becker and Woessmann, 2009]

or on the binary Protestant-or-Catholic religious choice made by territorial rulers or cities

in the mid-1500s [Cantoni, 2010, Rubin, 2014].7

The second contribution of this research is to document the relationship between

competition in local media markets, the diffusion of Protestant media, and institutional

change. We find cities with a larger number of competing firms were more likely to

produce Protestant media and produced more Protestant media – even controlling for

the pre-Reformation size and composition of media output. But we also document how

media market competition interacted with pre-Reformation institutions. Specifically, we

show that the relationship between competition and the diffusion of Protestant media

was differentially stronger in cities that had the least institutional and political autonomy

from territorial authorities.8 To document the relationship between exposure to Protes-

tant media, and media market competition, and institutional change we construct new

data on city-level laws of the Reformation. The data include city-level laws passed over

the crucial period of the 1520s and 1530s, and before princes adopted the Reformation

at the territorial level. We find that variations in pre-Reformation media market com-

5In the data section below, we describe these titles. The median title is 21 words long (the mean titleis 20.4 words). The median title has 153 characters (mean 149.6). For comparison, twitter messages areno longer than 140 characters. As discussed below, estimation strategies similar to ours are widely usedto classify the content of tweets, spam email, and other short texts.

6For similar estimation strategies see Taddy [2013b] and Gentzkow and Shapiro [2010], which measuresthe “slant” (ideology) of US newspapers by determining whether they employ language similar to thelanguage used in speeches by Democratic or Republican representatives in the US Congress. Details ofthe estimation strategy are discussed below. The data we construct identify the author, city and year ofpublication, and the printing firm for each book. We identify the firm producing each individual bookfrom the printer information contained on the front pages of historical books (see below and Dittmar[2015] for details on the construction of firm-level data).

7Basten and Betz [2013] examine differences in contemporary preferences using a fuzzy regressiondiscontinuity along a border between Protestant and Catholic cantons in Switzerland.

8The research emphasizes the city as the key unit of analysis because historical trade costs were veryhigh. Due to historic trade costs, the key competitive dynamics were within-city and city-level outputwas the key determinant of city-level exposure. Dittmar [2015] provides discussion and micro-data thatdescribe the distance-price gradient for books traded between cities in the early 1500s.

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petition mattered for subsequent institutional change specifically in the subset of cities

without formal institutional and political autonomy from territorial lords. The legal

institutions we examine are 2,000+ municipal church ordinances (evangelische kirchenor-

denung). These laws stipulated correct religious doctrine, reformed the nature of munic-

ipal social welfare provision, and established the organization, funding, and oversight of

Europe’s first public education system. No previous quantitative research has analyzed

systematic data on these municipal reformation laws, to the best of our knowledge.

The third contribution of the research is to provide new evidence on quasi-experimental

variation in competition. Specifically, we assemble evidence on the chance timing of the

deaths of master printers to isolate variations in competition that are likely unrelated

to other characteristics of cities that may have made them more or less likely to pro-

duce Protestant media. We also study variations in competition that are explained by

lagged competition, and which are as a result plausibly free of endogenous entry we might

imagine occurring on the eve of the Reformation in cities more receptive to innovation.

These contributions address a bigger picture question in economics and span several

literatures. An influential body of scholarship traces differences in contemporary eco-

nomic performance and behavior to the legacies of historically determined institutions

or beliefs [Acemoglu et al., 2001, Guiso et al., 2003]. This literature calls our attention

to the persistance of key social institutions, but at the same time raises the question:

Where do fundamental institutions come from and what explains the dynamics of radical

institutional change? Here we explore the role of the media and market competition in

large scale, highly persistent institutional change. Our research design for constructing

an index of religious content in the media is an application of high-dimensional sta-

tistical techniques to historical data and builds on Gentzkow and Shapiro [2010] and

Taddy [2013b]. Our strategy for constructing evidence on industrial organization and

firm-level shocks in historic media markets builds on Dittmar [2015].9 What is innova-

tive here is that we (i) measure the diffusion of ideas in the media using techniques for

high-dimensional data, (ii) study how competition shaped the diffusion of revolutionary

religious ideas, and (iii) tie the diffusion of ideas and variation in competition to new

evidence on city level laws that formalized the institutional changes of the Protestant

Reformation. By examining how market competition had different effects on the diffu-

sion of religious ideas and the transformation of religious institutions in ex ante different

institutional settings we also hope to provide interesting evidence on religion’s “two-way

interaction with political economy” [McCleary and Barro, 2006].

9Dittmar [2015] studies firm-level competition across all European cities and firms and documentsthe relationship between the diffusion of business education literature and growth.

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The Protestant Reformation interests us as arguably one of the most important

changes in social institutions of last several hundred years. A substantial social sci-

ence literature indicates that the Reformation had a profound, lasting impact on beliefs,

institutions, and education. Arguments running back to Weber [1930] have suggested

that Protestantism fostered a work ethic and social norms conducive to commerce and

growth. A large literature in economics finds that religion and Protestantism in partic-

ular is associated with persistent differences in norms, human capital accumulation, and

economic development [Guiso et al., 2003, McCleary and Barro, 2006, Basten and Betz,

2013]. Recent research suggests that Protestant beliefs generated a demand shift for lit-

eracy that explains subsequent variations in technology adoption and economic outcomes

observed across historic Germany [Becker and Woessmann, 2009, Becker et al., 2011].10

Our research also responds to path-breaking economic studies of the diffusion of the

Reformation. Ekelund et al. [2002] study the differential diffusion of Protestantism across

more entrepreneurial and more rent-seeking states, and the relationship between laws

supporting primogeniture and diffusion at the principality level. The current research

examines the competition and religious change by studying variation in competition in

city media markets, including variation induced by firm-level shocks. Becker and Woess-

mann [2009] study the relationship between Protestantism and literacy across Prussian

counties in the 1800s, and use distance from Wittenberg as an instrument for Protes-

tantism. We show that distance from Wittenberg was associated with the diffusion of

Protestant ideas in the media and with formal municipal change at the municipal level,

but through the interaction between distance and pre-Reformation competition in media

markets. In interesting and closely related work, Rubin [2014] finds that Protestantism

was more likely to be adopted in cities that had a printing press in 1500. A key take

away from the current research is that the diffusion of the Reformation depended on the

extent of competition and that conditional on observable competition the mere presence

of printing is not a significant explanatory factor for diffusion.11 Cantoni [2012] focuses

on the adoption of Protestantism by princes at the territorial level.12 We study the early

10[Cantoni, 2010] provides an interesting contrast, observing that city growth was historically asso-ciated with economic dynamism, and finding there is no evidence that cities in territories where rulersadopted Protestantism in the 1600s enjoyed any subsequent growth advantage.

11In addition, the data and design in Rubin [2014] do not provide evidence on the actual diffusion orcontent of media, and cannot rule out alternate ways the correlation between having a printing pressand adopting Protestantism could emerge. As Rubin explains the research design cannot disentanglesupply-side and demand-side determinants of religious change (p. 275).

12Cantoni [2012] also does not construct systematic or high frequency evidence on ideas in the media,but suggests that distance from Wittenberg may have been unimportant for access to Protestant printmedia based on evidence from a source recording books and pamphlets authored by Luther and heldby the British Museum as of the 1960s. In the more comprehensive micro-data presented below, wefind a significant relationship between distance from Wittenberg and exposure to Protestant media, anddocument how the interaction between distance and competition in local media markets mattered for

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diffusion of the Reformation at the city-level before princes adopted at the territory level

and before the formal legal settlement (The Peace of Augsburg 1555) that established

rules governing the religious geography and prerogatives of princes across Germany.

2 History

In this section we present an overview of the history of the Reformation. The Reformation

began as a protest of Catholic clerics and scholars against church institutions and their

superiors. It became a mass movement that led to profound institutional change.

Two key features distinguish the Protestant Reformation from previous attempts to

challenge church institutions and practices. First, when the Catholic church attacked

the protesting clergy, the reformers responded by developing and dissemminating their

arguments in print media. Second, politically active laymen adopted and adapted these

calls for reform and pressed them on their governors [Cameron, 1991, p. 2].

The Reformation was based on a critique of existing church institutions and practices.

Reformers called for moral renewal within cities [Moeller, 1972], emphasized their belief

that biblical authority was paramount over and above the authority of existing church

institutions [Brady, 1978], and were often though not always anti-clerical [Dykema and

Oberman, 1993]. The reforms that were at the heart of the Reformation included the

abolition of the Catholic rite mass, rejection of the rule that clergy should be celibate,

and moves to reduce and set up safeguards against church corruption.

The Reformation is usually dated to October 1517, when Martin Luther circulated

a set of hand-written theses criticizing church corruption in Wittenberg. Luther was a

Augustinian monk and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg. Luther’s

theses notably criticized the Catholic church’s practice of selling indulgences which were

believed to secure the release of dead relatives from purgatory in the afterlife. The

proceeds from the sale of indulgences were used to finance church investments (e.g. the

basilica of St. Peter in Rome) and consumption.13 Luther circulated his theses in letters

to three correspondents. Within months they were being printed in multiple German-

speaking cities. Over the coming years Luther produced a large volume of written work

diffusion.13In his 86th thesis, Luther asked: “Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the

wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of Saint Peter with the money of poor believers ratherthan with his own money?” Crassus was the wealthiest individual in Roman history and among thewealthiest of all time. Crassus got rich through real estate speculation, the slave trade, and insiderpolitical expropriations, and played a central role in Rome’s transformation from Republic into Empire.

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and become the first best-selling super-star author.14

The Reformation consisted of several partially overlapping phases [Harrington and

Smith, 1997, Brady, 2009]. The popular or communal Reformation (Gemeindereforma-

tion) ran approximately 1518-1525 and saw the initial explosion of debate in the media

and the emergence of popular pro-Reform movements.15 The magisterial Reformation

1525-1555 saw significant further use of the media and the institutionalization of the

Reformation, starting at the city level and initially without support from local lords and

city elites, as discussed below. The environment in which Protestant ideas diffused, and

the possibilities for translating activism into institutional change, were transformed in

the 1540s. In the 1540s, the diffusion of Protestantism was checked by the Catholic vic-

tory in the Schmalkaldic War of 1546-1547. Following this war, the Peace of Augsburg

(1555) formalized in law a religious settlement. This settlement governed the religious

geography of the Holy Roman Empire and religious prerogatives of rulers – effectively

fixing the religious institutions.

Historians argue that print media played a central role in the diffusion of the Protes-

tant Reformation [Edwards, 1994, Brady, 2009]. In the early years of the movement,

Reformist ideas were innovations with very uncertain prospects that had not yet dif-

fused through the population and printers risked their businesses for their religious ideas

[Chrisman, 1982]. As Chrisman [1982, p. 29] observes, “The importance of the printers

lay neither in birth, wealth, property, nor political power...It lay in their control of the

printed word. Ultimately, their decision to print or not to print a particular book or tract

could have an immediate effect on political and religious events and, in a time of rapid

change, on institutions. The most striking example of their influence can be seen in the

religious publication of the pivotal years of the Reformation.” Beyond the impact of the

particular book or tract, historical research suggests that the overall shift in ideas and

increase in quantity of print media influenced events. “It was the superabundance, the

cascade of titles, that created the impression of an overwhelming tide, an unstoppable

movement of opinion...Pamphlets and their purchasers had together created the impres-

sion of irresistible force.” [Pettegree, 2005, p. 163]. Tens and even hundreds of thousands

of copies of individual Lutheran pamphlets were printed and Martin Luther became the

first best-selling author. As a counterfactual to the success of Protestantism in the print

age, historians have examined the failure of pre-print heresies such as Lollardism in Eng-

land and the Hussite movement in Bohemia in the late 1300s and early 1400s. The

14The Reformation was by no means restricted to cities. Religious ideas were notably central to theso-called peasants’ war of 1525 [Blickle, 1981]. This research focuses on the urban reformations butprovides some discussion of the peasants’ war below.

15In 1524-1525, the Peasants’ War broke out and the popular movement combining demands forreligious and economic reform was crushed militarily [Blickle, 1981].

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suppression of the Hussite movement involved the burning of some 200 manuscripts in

Prague in 1410.

The ideas of the Reformation spread through a two-part process and were followed

by staggered institutional change [Edwards, 1994]. First, print media impacted “opin-

ion leaders,” notably clergy and educated laymen.16 Opinion leaders then transmitted

ideas orally to the broad public and developed a militant popular movement. Thus for

example in Augsburg, “A wave of religious pamphlets and, from 1520, the introduction

of evangelical preaching, spread the new teaching” [Broadhead, 1996, p. 581].

The city-level Reformations were popular movements that first developed without ef-

fective support from either city governments or territorial lords.17 The constituency for

reform came from sections of city populations that were excluded from political power by

plutocratic and oligarchic elites, typically lesser merchants and guild members [Ozment,

1975, pp. 121-3]. Significantly, city councils “seldom or never initiated a local Reforma-

tion” [Dickens, 1979, p. 20]. Thus Cameron [1991, p. 240] observes, “As a rule neither

the city patricians nor the local princes showed any sympathy for the Reformation in

the crucial period in the late 1520s and early 1530s; they identified themselves with the

old Church hierarchy and accordingly shared its unpopularity. Popular agitation on a

broad social base led to the formation of a ‘burgher committee’.” This model notably

characterized the Reformation in its birth place: “It is undeniable that the Wittenberg

movement was borne on a wave of popular enthusiasm. It outran the city magistrate’s

ability to control it, and finally forced them to act even against the will of the Elector

[the ruler of the territory of Electoral Saxony, in which Wittenberg was located], who

had prohibited any innovations in church matters” [Scribner, 1979, p. 53]. Similarly,

the Augsburg city council was forced to drop its policy of religious neutrality following

riots in 1524, 1530, and 1534 [Broadhead, 1979]. In Northern cities, such as Rostock,

Wismar, Stralsund, Griefswald, Lubeck, Braunschweig, Luneberg, Gottingen, Hanover,

and Lemgo institutional change led by citizens excluded from political power had a coup

d’etat quality [Cameron, 1991]. The chronology of protest and reform in Zwickau pro-

16A number of significant lay proponents of the Reformation were city clerks. For example, LazarusSpengler was the town clerk of Nurnberg and published a defence of Luther that was printed in Basel in1520. Jorg Vogeli became city clerk of Konstanz in 1524, and defended three local Reformist preachersin a series of publications over the 1520s.

17The Catholic church owned valuable lands and other assets, many of which were expropriated duringthe Reformation. It is thus natural to wonder whether governments and rulers were motivated by theprospect of financial gain. The historical evidence indicates, “there was no clear causal link betweenconfiscating lands and turning Protestant.” [Cameron, 1991, p. 296] In several cases rulers extractedresources from the Church many years before their own religious position was defined. The dukes ofBavaria used the threat of making concessions to protestants to extract resources from the estates ofthe Catholic church, but remained Catholic. At the city level, expropriated assets were put to new uses,largely for the provision of public goods.

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vides an example of the way in which popular action led city-level reform. In Zwickau,

pro-reform citizens ransacked the local abbey in 1522. In 1524 weddings and feasts were

held in delibrate violation of the Lent fasting period – but the city council to confiscated

some of the slaughtered animals. In January 1525, the Franciscan monastery broken into

and desecrated. In February a public performance was staged involving a mock hunt of

Catholic monks and nuns. In March 1525, anti-clerical marches were held and the city

council deprived the Franciscan order of key source of revenue by rescinding its legal right

to brew beer. In April 1525, Catholic ceremonies during Passion Week were banned and

the city council attempted to initiate bilateral negotiations with individual pro-reform

guilds. When the guilds refused to negotiate bilaterally, the city council was forced to

accept joint meeting of all guilds and city commune. In May 1525 the Franciscans were

expelled [Scribner, 1979].

The political decentralization and fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire were

important features of the environment in which the Reformation spread. Political de-

centralization and fragmentation limited the capacity of central and regional authorities

to regulate media markets and speech [Kapp, 1886, Creasman, 2012]. The Holy Roman

Empire was composed of a large number of semi-autonomous principalities, as well as 85

free imperial cities. The free imperial cities were jurisdictionally free from the control

of local territorial lords and princes. In theory answerable to the emperor, in practice

these cities had considerable political autonomy.18 In this context, suppression of dissent

was relatively costly and in fact slow to be tried. Printers producing Protestant media

were not censored in the early years of the Reformation and the Edict of Worms (1521)

banning Luther’s work was itself not rushed into print [Brady, 1985, p. 153]. By the

mid-1520s, magistrates and urban governments – notably in the free cities – begin to

defy the emperor and institute ordinances institutionalizing the Reformation. In 1526, a

formal magesterial right to reform (ius reformandi) was passed into law by the Imperial

Diet or parliament of the Holy Roman Empire [Brady, 2009, p. 55]. At the city-level,

the aims and nature of censorship were endogenous and flexible, “as much a product of

public opinion as a force acting upon it...interpretation and enforcement shifted as the

religious and political objectives of the communities evolved” [Creasman, 2012, p. 227,

64].19

Institutional change was implemented with considerable lags after the diffusion of the

18The number of cities with the legal status of free imperial cities fluctuated over time. There were85 such cities listed in the imperial budget (Reichsmatrikel) of 1521. The empire as a whole had arepresentative assembly called the Diet. The Diet provided representation for the different “estates”involved in governance. These included: seven electors (seven princes), the college of imperial princes,and the college of imperial cities.

19See also Chrisman [1982] for additional evidence. Cologne was the stark exception to the rule. OnCologne, see Scribner [1976].

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new ideas, and as the last and decisive step in formalizing the Reformation [Ozment,

1975]. Moreover, the institutional changes were gradual. In Wittenberg, Catholic mass

was not abolished until 1525. In Strasbourg, Catholic mass was restricted to specific

churches in 1525 and abolished only in 1529. In Nurnberg, the legal institutions of the

Reformation were instituted between 1520-1533. In Osnabruck, the process lasted from

1521 to 1542. By the middle 1500s, Lutheran Protestantism in historic Germany acquired

the geographic distribution it would maintain for several centuries [Brady, 1998, p. 373].

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) established the rule of cuius regio, euis religio (whose

rule, his religion) with exceptions for mixed cities where Protestants and Catholics were

to share churches and magistracies [Brady, 1998, p. 375].

The Protestant reformers designed and set-up new legal institutions governing re-

ligious practice and education. The legal institutions of the Reformation were church

ordinances (evangelische kirchenordnungen and schulordnungen) passed by magistrates

and municipal councils at the city level, and later by princes at the territorial level. These

ordinances designed the first mass public education system in Europe. The ordinances

established schools, sources of funding for education, and oversight mechanisms.20 The

oversight mechanisms included regular and formal “visitations” in which the physical

assets of schools would be inspected and both student and teacher performance would

be assessed and recorded.21 Below we examine data on some 1,800+ ordinances.

3 Data

We focus attention in this research on new media and institutional change in the German-

speaking regions of the Holy Roman Empire.

The primary source for data on print media is the Universal Short Title Catalogue

(USTC) database of St. Andrews [2012]. The USTC is designed as a universal catalogue

of all known books printed in Europe 1450-1600.22 We rely on Reske [2007], which

20A small subset of ordinances provide explicit terms of teacher pay.21Formal proclamations were printed and sent to each local authority before each visitation. Typically,

visitations occurred once per year. Local church officials were required to submit a tabulation of revenuesand inventory of relics. Preachers and towns and village people were formally questioned on doctrineand the adequacy of funding for local schools by inspectors who then submitted written reports. SeeStrauss [1978].

22The closest competitor dataset is the Consortium of European Research Libraries’ Heritage of thePrinted Book (HPB) database. The HPB is essentially a master catalog of the major national researchlibrary catalogs. However, since these catalogs are themselves incomplete for several countries the USTCprovides much more comprehensive coverage. In the Appendix, we present evidence that rules out theleading concern around survivorship bias due to historical events that might distort the data on historicalbooks.

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identifies the set of historically German-speaking cities with printing.23 Figure 1 shows

the boundaries of the principalities comprising the Holy Roman Empire and the German-

speaking cities where print media was produced 1450-1600. Our database comprises

114,483 titles that were printed 1457-1600 in these cities. The unit of analysis in this

paper is the book or pamphlet title (edition), which can be thought of as a variety.24

Figure 1: Cities Producing Books in German-Speaking Europe. Principality boundariesare as of 1500. Cities are German-speaking printing centers from Reske [2007].

We construct data on the religious affiliation of a subset of authors from several

sources. Klaiber [1978] provides data on 564 Catholic authors and “controversialists”

working in German-speaking Europe. For each author, the Klaiber data provide a stan-

dardized name, a list of name variants (alternate spellings and aliases), and a list of

publications. For Protestant authors we rely on Mullett [2010], Carey and Lienhard

[2000], and Wikipedia’s list of Protestant Reformers.25 Based on these sources, known

23These cities should be considered German-speaking in a qualified sense. Many were characterizedby linguistic diversity. Within German-speaking Europe High and Low German co-existed. The set ofcities in our data includes cities now in Austria, France (e.g. Metz and Strasbourg), Switzerland (e.g.Zurich and Basel), Poland (e.g. Gdansk, historically known as Danzig, and Szcezecin, historically knownas Stettin), the Czech Republic (e.g. Brno or Brunn), and Russia (Kaliningrad or Konigsberg).

24For a subset of several hundred books we have data on the number of copies printed per edition.These data and evidence from book contracts and printer’s correspondence indicate that the typicalprint run rose from 400-800 copies around 1500 to 1,000-1,400 copies in the later 1500s. We present thisevidence and further discussion of print runs in the appendix.

25See www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List of Protestant Reformers (downloaded 12/15/2012).

12

Table 1: Number of Words in Titles

Total Words Excluding Stop Words5th Percentile 3.0 2.025th Percentile 11.0 7.0Median 21.0 13.075th Percentile 33.0 20.095th Percentile 51.0 32.0Mean 23.2 14.4

Catholic authors account for 2,937 titles (3% of books) and known Protestants account

for 15,142 (15% of books).26

The research uses the text of long book and pamphlet titles to identify the language

most characteristic of Protestant and Catholic print media. Historical titles typically

provide an extended gloss on content. Table 1 summarizes the distribution of the word

lengths of these titles. The first column of Table 1 shows that the median title in our data

is 21 words long (the mean title is 23.2 words); at the 5th percentile titles are 3 words

long; at the 95th percentile titles are 51 words.27 To estimate the language characteristic

of religious authors we construct a vocabulary that excludes extremely rare words and

also examine the data with and without common “stop words” (words such as and and

the). The second column of Table 1 provides summary statistics on titles restricting to

the words in the estimating vocabulary without stop words.

To document the relationship between competition and the diffusion of religious con-

tent we construct annual annual panel data on the activity and output of 1,577 printing

firms operating in historic Germany 1450-1600. We construct these data by identifying

the individual firms that produced each publication from the information recorded on

the front pages of historic books and and pamphlets. Information identifying the print-

ing firm is available on 99% of historic media in highly non-standardized form.28 We

construct standardized firm-level identifiers for each printer and book. For details see

Dittmar [2015] and the appendix below. The timing of printer deaths is determined

from several sources. First, inscriptions on books indicate when printing is done by “the

26The print media dominance of Protestant reformers has been observed by social historians and inearlier research based on small samples of historical print media. For instance, Edwards [1994, p. 29]finds in a sample of vernacular (German-language) pamphlets that the ratio of works by Martin Lutherto works by Catholic publicists was approximately 5 to 1.

27The median title has 153 characters (mean 171.6). For comparison, twitter messages are no longerthan 140 characters. A substantial literature employs statistical models to identify sentiment in twittermessages. For example, Taddy [2013c]; Go et al. [2009]; Pak and Paroubek [2010]; Bollen et al. [2011];Bifet and Frank [2010].

28Printers are identified in multiple languages (e.g. Latinized and German variants of the same name),with non-standard spelling, abbreviations, and in some instances aliases.

13

widow of...” or “the heirs of...” The first year in which this designation appears on a

firm’s output is taken as the year of a death.29 Second, we code the year of death for all

printers where this is known in historical sources [Reske, 2007, CERL, 2012]. Below we

consider any deaths occuring more than 2 years after a printer’s last observed publication

as the death of an inactive or “retired” printer.

To identify the legal institutions of the Reformation we code over 2,000 reforma-

tion ordinances (kirchenordnungen) passed at the municipal and provincial levels. These

ordinances were laws written and passed by local magistrates to institutionalize the ref-

ormation. The ordinances have five key dimensions embodied in provisions governing (1)

religious dogma, (2) public morality, (3) sex, family, and marriage, (4) social welfare and

poor relief, and (5) education (Witte 2002). A key innovation in the new legal framework

was provision for state-run education in the form of city and territorial schools, together

with a system of funding and oversight. The principal source for the data on reforma-

tion ordinances is Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des 16 Jahrhunderts (21

volumes 1902-1910).30 We supplement Sehling with historical sources described in the

appendix to identify the dates of ordinances in cities outside contemporary Germany.

We use city population data from Bairoch et al. [1988] and data from the Prussian

Censuses of the 1800s Becker et al. [2012]. These data are described as introduced.

4 Measuring Religious Ideas in Media

4.1 Overview

The research estimates a model of how the language chosen by authors changes with

religion. The research uses the model to derive low dimensional projections of high

dimensional text data that can predict authors’ religion. It uses these predictions to

construct an index of religious content in the media.

We construct an index of the religious content of print media as follows. We use

historical sources to identify the religious denomination – Protestant or Catholic – of a

subset of 500+ authors. We estimate a model of how how the distribution of language

chosen by authors changes with religion to determine which features of language used by

these authors are important in identifying their religious denomination. The estimated

29Dittmar [2015] documents that in the precise year of these deaths there are highly significant effectsnot only on output for the firm losing its manager, but also on city-level entrance and on output forfirms producing similar types of content.

30We refer to these volumes collectively as Sehling et al. [2009].

14

partisan ideology of language is used to predict the religious content of media where

authors’ religious affiliations are not known and to construct an index of religion in the

media. In the economics literature, Gentzkow and Shapiro [2010] use a similar estimation

strategy to identify the dimensions of political ideology in Congressional speeches and

to measure the political “slant” of US newspapers by documenting the extent to which

these media use language characteristic of Democrats or Republicans.31

The distinction between Catholic and Protestant authors is stark and revealing. We

argue that this distinction provides a fruitful starting point and powerful first model for

thinking about media markets and religious change in historic Germany. However, the

distinction between Catholics and Protestants clearly does not exhaust the distinctions

one could draw among authors and literatures.32

Our estimation strategy is able to classify religious content because historical book

titles provide extensive glosses on the content in books. The following examples will

help illustrate the amount of information contained in the titles. While 96% of books

and pamphlets in our database were written in German and Latin, here we provide

two examples of English-language books printed in 16th century Germany that may be

useful for English language readers. An example of a Protestant title is a book written

by Martin Luther and produced in Wesel (North Rhine-Westfalia):

The last wil and last Confeßion of martyn Luthers faith concerming the prin-

cipal articles of religion which are in controversy, which he wil defend &

maiteine until his death, agaynst the pope and the gates of hell.

An example of a Catholic title is a book written by John Old and produced in Emden

(East Frisia):

A Confeßion of the most auncient and true christen catholike olde belefe

accordyng to the ordre of the .XII. Articles of our comon crede, set furthe in

Englishe to the glory of almightye God, and to the confirmacion of Christes

people in Christes catholike olde faith.

These examples illustrate the fact that historical titles convey significant information

about content. They also suggest potential challenges in analyzing historical text data in

31Taddy [2013b] extends the Gentzkow and Shapiro (henceforth “GS”) approach by introducing amodel-based framework to estimate such indices. Taddy shows that the GS index is a special case in theInverse Regression (IR) framework which seeks to reduce high-dimensional text data to low-dimensionalsufficient statistics. Taddy [2013c] applies a similar strategy to measure political sentiment in twitter“tweets.”

32Extensions could distinguish between Lutheran, Calvinist, and Zwinglian ideas in Protestant media,between different types of Catholic authors, and between time varying features of religious language.

15

which spellings are not yet standardized. The results below suggest that these difficulties

do not preclude obtaining useful estimates.33

Below we describe our estimation strategy and show that it accurately predicts the

religious affiliation of known religious authors in out-of-sample tests. We also document

that our measures of the local production of religious ideas capture information not

present in the existing bibliographic meta-data – which simply designate book subjects

as religious or non-religious, without capturing the denominational nature of the content.

Similarly, we are able to estimate the religious content of print media in 136 cities while

books produced by our set of known religious authors appeared in only 104 cities.

4.2 Estimator

Using the subset of texts for which we code whether the author is Protestant or Catholic,

we apply an estimation strategy that first provides a low-dimensional representation of

each text that preserves the religious content or sentiment and second classifies this

low-dimensional representation according to the religious affiliation of the authors. We

are then able to find low-dimensional representations of religious content those texts for

which we do not know the author’s religious affiliation and to predict these authors’

religion. This estimation framework is the multinomial inverse regression (MNIR) model

introduced by Taddy [2013b].34 The estimation strategy follows the literature in high-

dimensional estimation and machine learning, assumes that the order of phrases or words

within a document is relatively unimportant in classifying the content of the text, and

views documents as a bag of words [Salton and McGill, 1986]. This assumption allows

documents to be treated as as multinomial random variables in which the phrases or

words are the categories and the support is called the vocabulary.35

Formally, let a document be denoted X i = [xi1,...,iW ] where xiw represents the number

of times phrase w appears in document i for each of the W words in the the vocabulary

V . We are interested in identifying the features that allow us to classify the documents

33While it is possible to identify spelling variants as the same word, it is not clear that introducingstandardizations or model features to capture orthographic variations would improve the precision ofour estimates. Because spelling conventions reflect both regional and ideological influences, orthographicstandardization could entail the loss of potentially valuable information. For this reason, and becausestandardizing orthography is a difficult computational problem exacerbated by the fact that we havenearly 70 different languages and language combinations in the texts, we analyze texts “as is.”

34Inverse Regression models belong to a family of models whose purpose is dimensionality reduction[Cook and Ni, 2005, Cook and Weisberg, 1991, Cook, 2007, Li, 1991, Li et al., 2007]. Taddy [2013b]contributes to this literature by introducing an inverse regression estimator for multinomial variablesthat can be applied to document classification problems [Taddy, 2013a].

35As Taddy [2013c] observes, this model assumption increases efficiency by making an assumptionabout the functional relationship between text and sentiment.

16

according to their religious content r with r ∈ P,C for Protestant or Catholic. Since the

distribution of a sum of multinomial draws from the same distribution is multinomial,

we are able to pool the observations into (at least) two classes P and C such that

Xr =∑

i xiwr for r ∈ P,C. Our model for documents is

Xr ∼MN(qr,mr) where

qrw =exp [αw + rϕw]∑Wj=1 exp [αj + rϕj]

for w = 1, . . . ,W, r ∈ P,C(1)

Each Xr is a W−dimensional multinomial variable with size mr =∑

imir with

mir =∑

w xiwr and probabilities qr = [qr1, . . . , qrW ]. The estimated factor loadings ϕ

allow us to compute a sufficient reduction (SR) score zi for document word frequencies

f i = xi

misuch that

zi = ϕ′f i ⇒ ri ⊥⊥X i,mi | zi (2)

This sufficient reduction score zi is a scalar containing all relevant sentiment informa-

tion in document i independent of the fullX i and its length. This identifying assumption

allows us to ignore the full-dimensional X i and model the classification problem as a uni-

variate regression problem, called the forward regression in the IR literature:

Pr(ri = r | zi) =1

1 + exp [β0 + β1zi](3)

Finally, to estimate the religious content of the texts for which it is not already known,

we take the projection of the factor loadings estimated in (1) onto the frequencies of these

out-of-sample texts to obtain SR scores zi. We then use the coefficients from (3) to infer

the religious content of the texts.

Since text analysis problems commonly lead to both fat-tailed and sparse distribu-

tions, independent Laplace priors with unknown variance are placed on the factor load-

ings ϕw. The unknown rate parameter λw accounts for our uncertainty as to how much

variable-specific regularization is appropriate. The rate parameter is given a gamma

hyperprior Γ(α, β) such that:

Pr(ϕw, λw) =λw2e−λw|ϕw| β

α

Γ(α)λα−1w e−βλw , α, β, λw > 0. (4)

Estimation of the likelihood implied by the multinomial distribution in (1) and the

17

prior (4) takes place via the gamma-lasso algorithm to maximize the joint posterior over

coefficients and their prior scale [Taddy, 2013b,a].

4.3 Estimation Results

To estimate the MNIR model and produce the results in this section, the research con-

structs the estimating vocabulary using the log-odds ratio statistic with an informative

Dirichlet prior for each term [Monroe et al., 2008]. We use the log-odds ratio to select the

vocabulary based on its performance in cross-validation tests over held-out subsamples of

the data. The log-odds ratio has superior performance in terms of precision (the absence

of Type I errors) and recall (the absence of Type II errors) when compared to a vocab-

ularly constructed using the χ2 measure of Gentzkow and Shapiro [2010] and estimates

that rely only on model-based feature selection obtained via regularization inherent in the

estimator. The Appendix Identifying Partisan Language A provides detailed comparisons

of these methods to support our preferred approach.36

When peforming the forward regression both in-sample and when doing out-of-sample

predictions, we collapse all of the titles for one author to obtain a single oeuvre. We do this

for two reasons. First, it yields a single predicted probability for each author, Catholic

or Protestant, rather than a prediction for each title. Second, it makes the multinomial

observations less sparse, improving accuracy of classification. After eliminating words

that are not in the vocabulary and collapsing across authors, we have on average 362

words per author in the training set in which we know the author’s religious affiliation

and 40 words on average for each author in the data for which the religious affiliation of

the author is unknown.

We show the high overall performance of the estimator in two ways. First we present

in-sample classification to show how well the estimator does with all of the data. Figure

2 presents in-sample estimates and shows that the estimator predicts correctly in-sample

approximately 86% of the time.37

36Appendix Identifying Partisan Language A also describes how the research prepares the titles foruse in the classifier by dropping punctuation and converting all letters to lower-case, and providescomparisons of results estimated with and without stop words retained in titles.

37For comparison, Gentzkow and Shapiro [2010] have a similar goal – to predict party affiliation ofmembers of Congress based on the text of their speeches – and obtain a correlation of 0.61 betweentrue and predicted affiliation. In our setting, in-sample mis-classifications may be partly explained bythe limited information available for prediction for some authors. The median number of publicationsfor the authors who are mis-classified is 2, while those whom we correctly predict have 6. The mediannumber of unique words in the collected works for the authors whom we misclassify is 34, while we have151 for authors whom we correctly classify. Introducing more exogenous information, such as places ofpublication, time, etc. may help us to better predict those for whom we have fewer works.

18

Protestant Catholic0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Pr(

Pro

test

ant=

=1)

Figure 2: In-sample performance for MNIR estimator over all known Protestant andCatholic authors. The estimator correctly predicts 86% of the authors’ religious affilia-tions. Incorrect predictions are in red (on-line version).

Second, we perform cross-validation and present results showing how the estimation

strategy performs under different prior specifications to address concerns about overfit-

ting. To perform the cross-validation, we split the data for which we know the author’s

religious affiliation into a training subset and a testing subset. We use 80% of the data

for training and reserve 20% to test out-of-sample performance.38 We do this for 100

random sub-samples. In the process, we vary the shape parameter α of the gamma hy-

perprior which controls the sparsity of the estimates. Increasing α can reduce problems

with overfitting through a stronger preference for regularization.

Figure 3 documents the strong out-of-sample performance of the estimation strategy

in terms of precision and recall as measured by the F1 score. The F1 score provides a

summary measure of accuracy – the harmonic mean of precision (the absence of Type

I errors) and recall (the absence of Type II errors).39 Figure 3 shows hyperprior α = 1

has the best out-of-sample performance and that the model performs best when stop

words are included during vocabulary selection and estimation. It is also notable that

these cross-validation results are consistent with the estimators in-sample performance.

In the appendix we present example training-test splits where Martin Luther (notable

Protestant) and Johannes Eck (notable Catholic) are in the held-out test data to highligh

how well we predict notable religious authors.

38We obtain nearly identical results using a 65:35 split between training and test data.39The F1 score is discussed in detail in the Appendix Identifying Partisan Language A.

19

s = 0.01 s = 0.10 s = 1.00 s = 10.00Prior for shape

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

F-M

easu

re

Includes stop words

s = 0.01 s = 0.10 s = 1.00 s = 10.00Prior for shape

Stop words removedF-measure

Figure 3: F1-measure on held-out data. s is the hyperprior parameter in Γ(s, .5). 100runs of the model trained on 80% of the data and predicted on the held-out 20%.

5 Summary of the Diffusion of Religious Ideas

In this section we use our measure of media content to characterize the diffusion of

Protestant content across time and space and media markets. We aggregate book-level

estimates of religious content to obtain summary measures of religious ideas at the re-

gional and city level.

First, we document the sharp and previously undocumented discontinuity observed in

media content in 1517 – the year Luther circulated his theses. Figure 4 presents the mean

of the estimated index of religious content in print media for all of Germany 1475-1600.

Figure 4 shows that the relative intensity of Catholic-type speech was approximately sta-

ble in the run up to the Reformation, at which point there is a discontinous shift towards

Protestant-type speech. The first panel shows our estimates for all religious books. The

second panel examines just religious publications in German and documents a positive

pre-1517 trend away from Catholic-type speech in vernacular media. In German lan-

guage media, there is also a relatively much larger increase in the number of publications

printed in the post-1517 period as indicated by the scale of the annual markers. The ev-

idence of a trend away from Catholic-type media in the vernacular before Luther’s 1517

intervention is consistent with the observation that Protestantism was in part a response

to underlying cultural trends.40 The third panel documents that the discontinuous shift

towards Protestant-type speech also characterizes religious media in Latin.

Second, in Figure 5 we map the evolution of media output at the city level. In Figure

5, city markers are scaled to reflect the number of titles produced and shaded to reflect

the average value of the Religion Index for city-level output. Lighter markers indicate

40Thus Cameron [1991, p. 175] observes that the majority of first-generation reformers had beeninfluenced by Renaissance humanism before they became advocates of religious reform.

20

0

.25

.5

.75

1R

elig

ion

Inde

x

1475 1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

All Religious Books

0

.25

.5

.75

1

Rel

igio

n In

dex

1475 1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

Religious Books in German

0

.25

.5

.75

1

Rel

igio

n In

dex

1475 1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

Religious Books in Latin

Figure 4: Religion index in historic Germany. Protestant = 1. Catholic = 0. Markerspresent the annual mean of the religion index across all publications. Marker sizes arescaled to represent the relative number of publications in each year.

Catholic-type media. Darker markers indicate Protestant-type media. Panel A presents

data for the period up to 1517, when Martin Luther posted his Theses. Panel B presents

data for the period 1518-1539, at which point the Catholic Duke Georg of Saxony died.

Panel C presents data for 1540-1555, from Duke Georg’s death to the Peace of Augsburg.

Panel D presents data 1556-1600.

6 Determinants of Diffusion in the Media

6.1 Motivation

We study several dimensions of the media industries and the diffusion of Protestant

content in the media.

First, we study the relationship between the competition in media markets on the eve

of the Reformation and the subsequent diffusion of Protestant media. The key variable

we examine is the number of firms active in a given city in the period just before the

Reformation. As a baseline, we use the ten-year period 1508-1517, however similar results

obtain for other relatively short windows pre-1518. We also observe and control for the

number and composition of print media varieties produced pre-1518.

Second, we study how variations in initial local institutions impacted the diffusion of

Protestant ideas through their interaction with the media market competition channel.

Historical research suggests that cities with legal autonomy from local lords played a

central role in the diffusion and adoption of the Reformation [Moeller, 1972, Brady,

21

A: Media Output 1501-1517 B: Media Output 1518-1539

Page 1 of 1

2/21/2013file:///E:/Dropbox/share_maps_mean_period1.svg

Page 1 of 1


C: Media Output 1540-1555 D: Media Output 1556-1600

Page 1 of 1


Page 1 of 1


Figure 5: City-level print media output. City markers are scaled to reflect the numberof book titles produced. Markers are shaded to reflect the average value of the ReligionIndex for city-level output. Cities with lighter (whiter) cities produce Catholic-type printmedia. Cities with darker (blacker) cities produce Protestant-type print media.

2009]. The institutions most typically identified with the diffusion of the Protestant

Reformation were arrangements securing cities’ legal autonomy from the rule of local

territorial lords and princes [Cameron, 1991]. The cities with legal autonomy from feudal

lords were “free imperial cities” (Freie und Reichsstadte). The free cities were legally

subordinate only to the distant emporer and have been identified as unusual in their

role in and propensity for adopting the Reformation [Moeller, 1972], when compared to

cities subject to territorial princes, whether ecclesiastical (e.g. prince-bishops) or secular

(dukes, counts, etc.).. Of the 85 free imperial cities recorded in the tax register of 1521

(Reichsmatrikel), 73 fall within the geographic bounds of this study and of these 50

ultimately adopted the formal legal reforms of the Reformation.41

41Schmidt [1984] argues that only 69 of the 85 cities listed in the Reichsmatrikel truly met the criteria

22

Third, we examine how the relationship between initial competition and subsequent

diffusion of the Protestant Reformation changed in the mid-1500s. The change occurred

following the the defeat of Protestants in the Schmalkaldic War (1546-7) and the subse-

quent Peace of Augsburg (1555), which introduced of a legal settlement that governed

the religious geography and the religious prerogatives of rulers.

The research documents three facts for which systematic quantitative evidence has

not previously been available.

First, we document how industrial structure in media markets was associated with

city-level variation in adoption of Protestant media. Specifically, we show that cities

in which more firms were competing in media markets just prior to the Reformation

subsequently (i) were more likely to produce Protestant media and (ii) produced larger

volumes of Protestant media post-1517. We document that this relationship between

competition and the diffusion of Protestant media holds controlling for a rich set of

observables and when the chance timing of the deaths of master printers is used to identify

exogenous variation in competition. We show that there is no similar relationship between

competition and other sorts of religious media. We also show that it is competition that

matters rather than the mere presence of printing per se.42

Second, we document that the relationship between media market competition and the

diffusion of Protestant media was strongest in cities with the least legal and institutional

autonomy from territorial princes. We interpret this finding as indicative of the fact

that market competition mattered most for the diffusion of ideas where political freedom

was most restricted. This comparison is possible because there was historic variation in

whether cities were subject to the rule of territorial lords even across cities located in

the same principality.43 We also examine features of cities such as observe for each city

whether it was a member of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of merchant guilds

and market towns located along the Baltic littoral in Northern Germany, whether it had

a university, and the number of monasteries located in the cities.44

for institutional autonomy typically understood to define an imperial city. The results we report belowfollow the Reichsmatrikel classification, but are robust to using the alternative Schmidt classification.

42Our proxy measure of competition allows us to respond to the interesting research by Rubin [2014]documenting the correlation between a binary indicator for printing and subsequent Protestantism, bothby showing that the mean effect really embodies a competition effect and by studying sources of plausiblyexogenous variation in competition.

43For example, in Electoral Palatinate the city of Landau was an Imperial free city while Kaiserslautern,Heidelberg, Mannheim, Oppenheim, and Zweibrucken were subject to the territorial lord (the Elector).In the Duchy of Wurttemberg the city of Esslingen was a free city while Reutlingen, Stuttgart, Tubingen,and Ludwigsburg were subject to the Duke. In the Swiss Confederation, Basel, Schaffhausen, and SanktGallen were free, while Bern, Solothurn, and Zurich were not. Similar patterns are observed in otherprincipalities.

44We also observe whether a city had obtained formal market rights as of 1517 and the number of

23

Third, we show that distance from Wittenberg mattered for the diffusion of Protestant

media not alone but through its interaction with city-level competition on the eve of the

Reformation.

To further document the relationship between variations in competition and diffusion

of the new ideas, we compile data on the precise timing of the deaths of master printers.

The historical and statistical evidence shows that the deaths of master printers were as-

sociated with variations in the number of firms operating in a city [Dittmar, 2015]. The

evidence further suggests that variations in competition induced by manager deaths can

be used to recover estimates of the relationship between media market competition and

the diffusion of Protestant media that are plausibly unrelated to unobserved character-

istics of local culture and institutions that might have delivered both a larger number of

firms and a greater propensity to adopt Protestant ideas.

Motivated by the literature on the geographic diffusion of the Reformation, the re-

search also documents how geography interacted with competition in the diffusion process

[Pettegree, 2010, Becker and Woessmann, 2009]. Specifically, we show that proximity to

Luther’s base in Wittenberg was not associated with greater exposure to Protestant me-

dia on its own, but that distance mattered specifically for cities with more competitive

media markets on the eve of Martin Luther’s intervention.

6.2 Baseline Empirical Results

We first study the relationship between (i) media market competition and (ii) the diffusion

of Protestant media at the city level.

Table 2 reports results from negative binomial and OLS regressions that estimate the

positive relationship between the number of firms operating in local media markets on

the eve of the reformation and the number (count) of Protestant media varieties produced

1517-1600. Across specifications an additional firm was associated with an approximated

16%-26% increase in Protestant media. In magnitude this firm effect is equivalent to the

estimated effect of being at a location 100+ kilometers closer Wittenberg. In addtion, we

observe that there is a differential relationship between the number of pre-Reformation

firms and subsequent diffusion for cities that were subject to territorial lords (landstadt).

Moreover, when we control for this interaction the relationship between the characteristic

of having any printing pre-1517 and subsequent Protestantism declines in magnitude and

market rights granted using market rights data are from Cantoni and Yuchtman [2014] that are restrictedto the subset of cities located in contemporary Germany. We find no systematic relationship betweenthe market rights and the diffusion of the Reformation in media or law.

24

ceases to be statistically significant. A natural interpretation of these findings is that

competition in media markets mattered more in locations where political freedom was

otherwise most restricted, and that the crucial feature of the economic landscape was the

level of actual or potential competition rather than simply the presence of new media

technology in and of itself. The appendix provides further specifications to show that the

estimates are robust to dropping Wittenberg and to dropping all cities with more than

10 printing firms active 1508-1517.45

While average effects are interesting, we are naturally also interested in (i) how initial

competition predicts whether or not any Protestant media was diffused at the local level

and (ii) how initial competition was related to variations in output across the distribu-

tion. To address these questions we estimate a series of probit regressions. First, we

examine how competition was related to the diffusion of any Protestant content. Then

we examine how competition was related to the probability that a city crossed different

output thresholds, in the spirit of Angrist [2001].

It is natural to wonder how the differential relationship between competition and

the diffusion of Protestant media operated across output thresholds for (i) free imperial

cities and (ii) cities subject to territorial feudal lords. To summarize this relationship

we present marginal effects of from probit regressions with interactions that examine

whether output crosses thresholds c. The baseline specification is:

P (protestanti ≥ c) = Φ(α0firmsi,pre + α1lordi + α2[firmsi,pre · lordi] + βXi) (5)

We display the marginal effects from (5) graphically in Figure 6.

Finally, our data also allow us to test the historical claim that the environment in

which the Protestant Reformation diffused changed radically in the 1540s, when first

military conflict and then a new institutional settlement stopped to progress of Protes-

tantism [Brady, 2009]. Taking these claims to our data, we document that variations

in the initial competitive environment predicted the diffusion of the Reformation over

the comparatively open period 1518-1545, but that media market competition does not

predict subsequent variations in Protestant output 1546-1600. These findings are con-

sistent with the historical observation that competition interacted with pre-Reformation

institutions and then ceased to be a key determinant of diffusion once a new institutional

equilibrium was established.

45These cities are: Augsburg, Basel, Koln, Nurnberg, and Strasbourg.

25

Panel A: Dependent Variable is Count of Protestant Post-1517 - Negative Binomial Regression

Protestant Protestant Protestant Protestant Protestant Protestant ProtestantMedia Media Media Media Media Media Media

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

Firms 1508-1517 0.26** 0.21*** 0.23** 0.16*** 0.19*** 0.18*** 0.18***(0.13) (0.06) (0.11) (0.05) (0.07) (0.07) (0.07)

Firms 1508-1517 x Lord Rule 0.34** 0.32 0.32*(0.15) (0.19) (0.19)

Indicator: Lord Rule 0.27 0.27 -0.01 0.01 -0.10(0.35) (0.35) (0.33) (0.35) (0.42)

Latin Media pre-1517 0.01 -0.00 -0.08 -0.08 -0.07(0.04) (0.04) (0.07) (0.07) (0.07)

Vernacular Media pre-1517 -0.21 -0.06 -0.14 -0.13 -0.13(0.26) (0.10) (0.15) (0.16) (0.16)

Religious Media pre-1517 -0.23 -1.68** -0.34 -0.50 -0.44(0.69) (0.73) (0.61) (0.79) (0.78)

Indicator: Hanseatic -0.37 -0.25 -0.43 -0.41 -0.43(0.28) (0.27) (0.29) (0.33) (0.35)

Distance to Wittenberg -0.15** -0.15** -0.11* -0.11** -0.14(0.08) (0.06) (0.06) (0.06) (0.10)

Indicator Pre-1517 Printing 1.29** 0.14 0.10(0.60) (0.70) (0.71)

Population at 1500 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes YesLatitude, Longitude Yes

Observations 144 144 144 144 144 144 144

Panel B: Dependent Variable is Ln of Protestant Post-1517 - OLS Regression

Protestant Protestant Protestant Protestant Protestant Protestant ProtestantMedia Media Media Media Media Media Media

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

Firms 1508-1517 0.22*** 0.19*** 0.19** 0.18* 0.15** 0.15** 0.15**(0.03) (0.06) (0.09) (0.09) (0.07) (0.07) (0.07)

Firms 1508-1517 x Lord Rule 0.26** 0.26** 0.26**(0.10) (0.12) (0.12)

Table 2: City level regressions of Protestant media on pre-Reformation competition.Panel A estimated with negative binomial regression. Panel B estimated with OLS andthe complete set of controls from the corresponding specification in Panel A. Standarderrors clustered on territorial principality. “Firms 1508-1517” is the number of competingfirms active 1508-1517. “’Latin Media pre-1517” and “Vernacular Media pre-1517” aremeasured in hundreds of titles. “Religious Media pre-1517” is the share of titles onreligious topics. Distance to Wittenberg is measure in hundreds of kilometers. Populationin 1500 is controlled for with fixed effects for bins: unknown, 1000, 2000-5000, 6000-1000,11000-25000. Population data are from Bairoch et al. [1988]. “Latitude, Longitude”controls for both individually and as an interaction. Significance at the 99%, 95%, and90% levels denoted “***”, “**”, and “*”, respectively.

26

Protestant >= 1 Protestant >= 25 Protestant >= 50(1) (2) (3)

Firms 1508-1517 0.72*** 0.27* 0.38*(0.27) (0.15) (0.20)

Indicator Pre-1517 Printing -0.59 0.41 -0.31(0.74) (0.65) (0.57)

Observations 142 142 142

Table 3: Probit regression marginal effects of the relationship between firms and theprobability that Protestant output crosses different thresholds. The dependent variableis a binary variable capturing whether or not the number of Protestant varieties exceeds1, 25, 50. All specifications include the complete set of controls from Table 2. Significanceat the 99%, 95%, and 90% levels denoted “***”, “**”, and “*”, respectively.

0

.2

.4

.6

.8

1

Pr(

Pro

test

ant =

1+

)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Firms Active

Lords Cities Free Cities

Protestant Titles 1 +

0

.2

.4

.6

.8

1

Pr(

Pro

test

ant =

25+

)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Firms Active



0

.2

.4

.6

.8

1

Pr(

Pro

test

ant =

50+

)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Firms Active



0

.2

.4

.6

.8

1

Pr(

Pro

test

ant =

100

+)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Firms Active



Figure 6: Marginal effects from probit regressions of Protestant media on pre-Reformationcompetition. All specifications include the complete set of controls from Table 2.

6.3 Endogeneity

The key finding is that cities with ex ante more competing firms were likely to produce

more Protestant varieties post-1518. Two natural questions arise as we consider this

fact and the possibility of causal inference. First, it is natural to wonder whether cities

had underlying, unobserved characteristics that drove variations both with the number

27

Dependent Variable: Protestant Varieties

Media Output 1518-1547 Media Output 1548-1600Protestant Protestant Protestant Protestant

Media Media Media Media(1) (2) (3) (4)

Firms 1508-1517 0.18*** 0.24***(0.06) (0.08)

Firms 1508-1517 x Lord Rule 0.46***(0.14)

Firms 1538-1547 0.03 0.03(0.04) (0.05)

Firms 1538-1547 x Lord Rule 0.14***(0.05)

Observations 142 142 140 140

Table 4: Regression estimates of the city-level relationship between initial media marketcompetition and subsequent Protestant output, before and after the Schmalkaldic Warof 1546-1547. All specifications estimated with negative binomial regression, clusteringstandard errors on territorial principality. “Firms 1508-1517” and “Firms 1538-1547” arethe number of competing firms active over these periods. All specifications control forinitial Latin media, vernacular media, and religious media, distance to Wittenberg, andcity population fixed effects as above. Standard errors clustered at the territory level.Significance at the 99%, 95%, and 90% levels denoted “***”, “**”, and “*”, respectively.

of firms (conditional on observables) and subsequent output of Protestant media. To

address this question, we document how variations in competition induced by the pre-

cise timing of the deaths of master printers induced variations in Protestant media using

an instrumental variable strategy. Second , it is natural to wonder whether cities that

became Protestant media centers experienced differential and/or selective entrance by

new media firms in the period immediately before the Reformation. If cities that were

newly economically and culturally vibrant cities attracted printers and became centers

of Protestant media, we might ascribe to printing variation in religion that reflects un-

derlying city-level dynamics. To isolate variation in competition that plausibly does not

reflect these sorts of time-varying features of local economies we examine use lagged val-

ues of media market competition to instrument for competition observed on the eve of

the Reformation.

We examine two different features of media markets that may raise concerns about the

relationship between the number of firms competing in media markets and subsequent

outpout. The first concern is that religious and/or culture ferment in the immediate pre-

Reformation period may have induced firms to differentially enter media markets that

would subsequently display a taste for Protestantism in the immediate pre-Reformation

28

period. To address this concern we consider estimation approaches that use lagged mea-

sures of competition to instrument for immediate pre-Reformation competition. The

second concern, is that the very economic and cultural characteristics that led some

cities to have more competitive media markets may have made these cities more pre-

disposed to reformist religious ideas. To address this concerns we consider variations in

city-level competition induced by the precise timing of master printers. These are two

very different types of potentially confounding variation, and our instrumental variables

strategies will isolate two correspondingly different types of variation in competition both

embodied in the measure of firms competing. Because the identification of variations in

competition due to printer deaths is more novel we provide addition discussion of how

these deaths impacted competition.

Historically, the death of a master printer had a very significant impact on the local

competitive environment [Dittmar, 2015]. Printer deaths had an impact on competition

because the competitive environment was typically characterized by a small number of

firms involved in strategic behavior designed to limit entrance and competition, often

including collusive arrangements [Reske, 2007]. Most cities with printing were served by

a few firms at any point in time: the mean city had 5.5 firms, the median city had 3 firms.

In this context the deaths of master printers represented very significant shocks to local

industrial organization, prompting significant increases in entrance [Dittmar, 2015].46

In our complete data (1454-1600) we observe statistically significant increases in en-

trance and in the number of firms in the precise city-year in which a manager death is

observed. This relationship holds controlling for the overall business environment in a

given city in that time period as absorbed in city-decade fixed effects. Figure 7 plots

regression estimatesof the relationship between firms competing and leads and lags of

printer deaths within-city, controlling for time and city fixed effects.

In the immediate pre-Reformation period we similarly find that cities with a printer

death in the period 1508-1517 experienced a net increase in the number competing firms.

The measure of printer deaths used in the analysis is the number of deaths at the city-

level recorded not more than 1 year after the last observed publication by a given printer.

This measure is designed to capture the deaths of active as oppposed to retired printers.47

46Dittmar [2015] assembles comprehensive panel data for all firms printing in Europe 1454-1600 anddocuments that the deaths of master printers were associated with significant increases in entranceat the city level in the precise year in which master printers died we observe significant increases inthe probability of observing new firms entering the market even controlling for the general nature ofmedia markets in specific cities in a tight window around theyear of a manager’s death as captured bycity-cross-five-year-period fixed effects.

47Deaths of retired printers can be taken as a placebo treatment. Consistent with social historyevidence, we find deaths of retirees have no significant relationship on variations in competition or onProtestant media.

29

-.5

-.25

0

.25

.5

.75

1

1.25

1.5

Cur

rent

Impa

ct o

n C

ity-L

evel

Firm

s

-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5Year Relative to Firm-Level Shock

Figure 7: Regression estimates of the relationship between city-level firms and leads andlags of printer deaths, controlling for city and time fixed effects.

Figure 8 presents the raw data in graphical form to show how cities in which printers

died on the eve of the Reformation saw more growth (lower declines) in the number of

firms serving their markets.

Using lags of firms and printer deaths as sources of plausibly exogenous variation in

competition 1508-1517, we find significant positive relationship between competition and

the diffusion of Protestant content. Table 5 documents the relationship between firms

competing and the logarithm of Protestant output. The key fact is that variations in the

number of firms induced by manager deaths are associated with quantitatively very large

output effects – over 100% – while variations induced by the long-run competitive struc-

ture of a city’s media markets are associated with an increase in output of approximately

25%-30%. There are several possible interpretations for this fact. First, a large body

of evidence suggests that printer deaths were huge shocks that transformed city media

markets, and specifically led permanent changes in industrial organization. Second, it

may be that the IV estimates that use printer deaths recover estimates that embody

underlying heterogeneity across cities: we observe deaths selectively in the sorts of cities

that we ex ante predisposed to innovation in religion. While this is possible, we observe

no relationship between the city-level rate of printer deaths in earlier periods and death

rates in this key period. Moreover the key identifying assumption is that the precise

timing of premature death is effectively random. Table 6 documents the significant posi-

30

-10

-5

0

5

Cha

nge

in #

Firm

s 14

98-1

507

to 1

508-

1517

0 1 2Printer Deaths 1508-1517

Figure 8: Change in number of firms active between 1508-1517 against the number ofobserved deaths of master printers 1508-1517. Change in the number of firms calculatedas the number active 1508-1517 less the number active 1498-1507. Markers are scaled toreflect the number of firms active 1498-1507.

tive relationship between printer deaths and the probability that city-level outputput of

Protestant media crosses different thresholds.

Dependent Variable: Ln Protestant Media Post-1517

Ln Protestant Ln Protestant Ln Protestant(1) (2) (3)

Firms 1508-1517 1.55** 0.26** 0.31**(0.62) (0.13) (0.13)

Firms 1498-1507 -0.96**(0.48)

IV for Firms 1508-1517 Printer Deaths 1508-1517 Yes Yes Firms 1498-1507 Yes YesF Statistic on IV 7.74 12.72 9.00

Observations 142 142 142

Table 5: 2SLS estimates of relationship between initial competition and subsequent dif-fusion of Protestantism. Dependent variable is logarithm of Protestant titles post-1517.All specifications include the complete set of controls from Table 2. Significance at the99%, 95%, and 90% levels denoted “***”, “**”, and “*”, respectively.

31

Dep

ende

nt V

aria

ble:

Pro

test

ant M

edia

Pos

t-15

17 C

ross

es T

hres

hold

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

Pro

test

ant

N >

= 1

N >

= 1

N >

= 1

N >

= 2

5N

>=

25

N >

= 2

5N

>=

50

N >

= 5

0N

>=

50

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

Fir

ms

1508

-151

70.

150.

030.

030.

20**

0.05

**0.

05**

0.16

***

0.06

***

0.06

***

(0.1

4)(0

.02)

(0.0

2)(0

.08)

(0.0

2)(0

.02)

(0.0

6)(0

.02)

(0.0

2)

Indi

cato

r: L

ord

Rul

e0.

28**

*0.

27**

*0.

27**

*0.

22**

*0.

21**

*0.

21**

*0.

23**

*0.

22**

*0.

22**

*(0

.06)

(0.0

6)(0

.05)

(0.0

6)(0

.08)

(0.0

8)(0

.07)

(0.0

8)(0

.08)

Lat

in M

edia

pre

-151

7-0

.02

-0.0

1-0

.01

-0.0

2-0

.02

-0.0

2-0

.02

-0.0

2-0

.02

(0.0

5)(0

.02)

(0.0

2)(0

.06)

(0.0

2)(0

.02)

(0.0

5)(0

.02)

(0.0

2)

Ver

nacu

lar

Med

ia p

re-1

517

-0.1

8-0

.07

-0.0

8*-0

.22*

*-0

.08*

*-0

.09*

*-0

.18*

**-0

.09*

**-0

.10*

**(0

.14)

(0.0

4)(0

.04)

(0.0

9)(0

.04)

(0.0

4)(0

.06)

(0.0

3)(0

.03)

Rel

igio

us M

edia

pre

-151

7-0

.13

-0.0

7-0

.07

-0.2

3-0

.16

-0.1

6-0

.14

-0.1

0-0

.09

(0.2

2)(0

.22)

(0.2

2)(0

.23)

(0.2

4)(0

.24)

(0.3

2)(0

.27)

(0.2

7)

Indi

cato

r: H

anse

atic

-0

.13

-0.1

3-0

.13

-0.1

0-0

.09

-0.0

9-0

.08

-0.0

7-0

.07

(0.1

0)(0

.10)

(0.1

0)(0

.08)

(0.0

7)(0

.07)

(0.0

6)(0

.05)

(0.0

5)

Dis

tanc

e to

Wit

tenb

erg

0.02

0.04

0.04

-0.0

4-0

.01

-0.0

1-0

.04

-0.0

2-0

.02

(0.0

4)(0

.03)

(0.0

3)(0

.03)

(0.0

2)(0

.02)

(0.0

2)(0

.03)

(0.0

3)

Indi

cato

r P

re-1

517

Pri

ntin

g0.

230.

140.

140.

44**

0.33

*0.

33*

0.27

0.19

0.19

(0.2

3)(0

.18)

(0.1

8)(0

.18)

(0.1

8)(0

.18)

(0.1

8)(0

.15)

(0.1

5)

Fir

ms

1498

-150

7-0

.09

-0.1

1*-0

.08

(0.1

0)(0

.06)

(0.0

5)

IV: P

rint

er D

eath

s 15

08-1

517

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

IV: F

irm

s 14

98-1

507

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

F S

tati

stic

on

IV7.

7412

.72

9.00

7.74

12.7

29.

007.

7412

.72

9.00

Obs

erva

tion

s14

214

214

214

214

214

214

214

214

2

Tab

le6:

2SL

Ses

tim

ates

ofpro

bab

ilit

yP

rote

stan

tm

edia

cros

sva

ryin

gth

resh

olds.

The

dep

enden

tva

riab

leis

anin

dic

ator

for

outp

ut

cros

sing

vary

ing

thre

shol

ds.

The

endog

enou

sin

stru

men

ted

vari

able

is“F

irm

s15

08-1

517”

.A

llre

gres

sion

sco

ntr

olfo

rp

opula

tion

in15

00,

lati

tude,

longi

tude,

and

thei

rin

tera

ctio

n.

Sta

ndar

der

rors

clust

ered

atth

ete

rrit

ory

leve

l.Sig

nifi

cance

atth

e99

%,

95%

,an

d90

%co

nfiden

cele

vel

den

oted

“***

”,“*

*”,

and

“*”.

32

6.4 Placebo, Robustness, and Evolution over Time

In this subsection, we document the differential nature of the relationship between com-

petition and Protestant media compared to the baseline for non-Protestant media and

the way competition interacted with geography. We also document how the relationships

between competition and geography and media diffusion evolved over time.

To document the role of competition and geography in diffusion, the research estimates

regressions with interactions that isolate the variations in media output associated with

variations different dimensions of the pre-Reformation economic environment. Specifi-

cally, the empirical set up considers city-level output in Protestant and Catholic varieties

separately. Regression analysis then documents the relationship between between com-

petition and religious output that is (i) common across Protestant and Catholic media

and (ii) specific to Protestant media alone. The empirical specification we consider fur-

ther documents how these relationships – the slopes between initial competition and

media output – evolve year-on-year. In addition, the specification documents how the

relationships between distance from Wittenberg and the two types of religious output

evolve year-on-year. Finally, the research also documents how the interaction between

competition and distance explains religious output over time.

The estimating model is:

Yikt =1600∑t=1500

βft (Dt · firmsi) +1600∑t=1500

βfpt (Dt · protk · firmsi)

+1600∑t=1500

βdt (Dt · disti) +1600∑t=1500

βdpt (Dt · protk · disti)+

1600∑t=1500

βfdt (Dt · firmsi · disti) +1600∑t=1500

βfdpt (Dt · protk · firmsi · disti)

+ δt + θi + εit

(6)

The outcome Yikt is the number of media varieties in city i of religion k at time t,

where we observe in each city-year an observation for k = protestant and k = catholic

and protk is an indicator for Protestant. The time-varying relationship between pre-1517

determinants and subsequent media exposure is captured by interacting fixed city-specific

characteristics like firmsi with a series of annual indicators Dt so that the coefficients

(βft , βfpt , etc.) capture the evolution of the slopes between pre-determinants and media

exposure.

Equation (6) is estimated using OLS and negative binomial regression. To summarize

33

the results, we plot the annual slopes that capture the time-varying relationships between

competition, distance, and their interaction and our two measures of religious media. For

this exercise, the sample is restricted to the set of 41 cities with printing by or before

1517 and estimation is conducted over data from 1500-1600. Implicitly, the exercise

classifies a small number of pre-1517 books as “Protestant” based on their use of language

characteristic of the authors and movement we retrospectively consider Protestant.

Figure 9 presents OLS in panel A and negative binomial estimates in panel B to

document three principal facts. First, there is a strong and persistent relationship be-

tween pre-Reformation competition measured by the number of firms active 1508-1517

and post-1517 Protestant media (bottom row left panel), but there is no significant

relationship between pre-Reformation competition and religious media in general (top

row left panel). Second, there is no relationship between distance from Wittenberg and

religious media in general (top row center panel) or between the interaction between

firms and distance and religious media in general (top row right panel). Third, there

is a negative relationship between Protestant media and distance to Wittenberg, but

this relationship operates through the interaction between distance and pre-Reformation

competition. Specifically, cities with more competitive media markets that were farther

from Wittenberg produced less Protestant media (bottom row right panel). Distance by

itself is weakly but positively associated with greater Protestant output (bottom row cen-

ter panel). These findings provide greater insight into the process of geographic diffusion

which Becker and Woessmann [2009] framed simply in terms of distance from Witten-

berg. Given that it is natural to compare these findings to the identification argument in

Becker and Woessmann [2009], it is important to also observe that our data include Swiss

cities that were relatively far from Wittenberg and produced considerable quantities of

Protestant media. Swiss and other German-speaking locations outside historical Prussia

are notably excluded from the data in Becker and Woessmann [2009], where distance

from Wittenberg is employed as an IV for Protestantism.

34

Panel A: OLS Estimates

-4.00

-2.00

0.00

2.00

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

FirmsAll Religious Media

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00

20.00

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

DistanceAll Religious Media

-0.50

0.00

0.50

1.00

1.50

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

Firms x DistanceAll Religious Media

-2.00

0.00

2.00

4.00

6.00

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

FirmsProtestant Media

-5.00

0.00

5.00

10.00

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

DistanceProtestant Media

-1.50

-1.00

-0.50

0.00

0.50

1.00

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

Firms x DistanceProtestant Media

Panel B: Negative Binomial Estimates

-0.40

-0.20

0.00

0.20

0.40

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

FirmsAll Religious Media

-4.00

-2.00

0.00

2.00

4.00

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

DistanceAll Religious Media

-0.10

0.00

0.10

0.20

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

Firms x DistanceAll Religious Media

-0.20

0.00

0.20

0.40

0.60

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

FirmsProtestant Media

-2.00

-1.00

0.00

1.00

2.00

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

DistanceProtestant Media

-0.20

-0.15

-0.10

-0.05

0.00

0.05

1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

Firms x DistanceProtestant Media

Figure 9: The time-varying relationship between counts of religious media varieties andfixed city-level determinants of output. In each panel the top row graphs report estimatesof βft , βdt , and βfdt from Equation (6). The second row reports estimates of βfpt , βdpt , andβfdpt The on-line version of this figure presents point estimates in red and 95% confidencebands in gray. Standard errors are clustered at the principality level. See text for details.

35

7 Institutional Change

In this section we present preliminary evidence from on-going research on the relationship

between print media, media markets, and the laws of the Protestant Reformation.

The Protestant Reformation was characterized by formal institutional change [Witte

and Marty, 2002, Ozment, 1975]. In the critical early stage of the Reformation ideas

were disseminated within and across cities and, where reformers were successful, city

level Reformation laws were passed by municipal councils and magistrates. Institutional

change at the territorial level were implemented only after significant numbers of cities

adopted reform. Figure 10 shows the number of cities passing their first Reformation law

and the total number of Reformation laws passed each year.

0

2

4

6

8

Law

s P

asse

d P

er Y

ear

1500 1520 1540 1560 1580 1600 1620 1640

Cities Passing First Reformation LawTotal Reformation Laws (5 Year Moving Average)

Figure 10: The city-level laws of the Reformation.

In Figure 11 we show the relative intensity of Protestant-type language in cities that

did and did not adopt city-level Reformation laws. Prior to the Reformation, the cities

that did and did not adopt the legal institutions of the Reformation were producing

relatively similar print media as measured by our religion index. During the initial years

of the Reformation cities that pass laws produce somewhat more Protestant content.

From the 1520s, a gap opens and stabilizes. Impressionistically, this is suggestive of a

story in which relatively modest differences in exposure were associated with sorting into

36

different equilibria.

0

.2

.4

.6

.8

1

Rel

igio

n In

dex

for

Med

ia

1475 1500 1525 1550 1575 1600

Cities that Pass Laws Cities that do not Pass Laws

Figure 11: The relative intensity of Protestant-type language in religious media.

Table 7 exploits data from the pre-1517 period to estimate the reationship between

measures of pre-Reformation media market competition and institutions and subsequent

city-level adoption of the legal institutions of the reformation. As in our examination

of Protestant print media, we find that the number of firms competing in local media

markets is a strong positive predictor of future Reform only for those cities ruled by

territorial lords. This supports the view that relationship between competition in media

markets and subsequent city-level institutional change was strongest among those cities

with initially low levels of institutional and policy autonomy, where reformist ideas faced

greater obstacles other things equal. Consistent with Becker and Woessmann [2009],

distance to Luther is a significant correlate of adoption – even with polity fixed-effects.

In addition, we find that cities that produced more vernacular (German language) media

before 1517 were more likely to adopt the Reformation and that cities ruled by territorial

or feudal lords were 15%-20% less likely to adopt legal reform.

To address concerns about the underlying relationship between market structure and

legal reform we also examine variations in market structure that are induced by firm-level

shocks. Table 8 presents instrumental variable regressions in which printer deaths in the

period 1508-1517 are the IV for firms active 1508-1517, conditional on the number of

firms active in earlier periods and a rich set of additional covariates. Panel A presents es-

37

Dependent Variable is Indicator for Cities that Instituted Legal Reform

Variable P(Reform) P(Reform) P(Reform) P(Reform) P(Reform) P(Reform)(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

Firms 1510-1517 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00 0.00 0.01(0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01)

Firms 1510-1517 x Lord Rule 0.03* 0.04** 0.05***(0.02) (0.01) (0.02)

Indicator: Printing 1510-1517 -0.07(0.10)

Distance to Wittenberg -0.12*** -0.13*** -0.08 -0.12*** -0.07 -0.07(0.02) (0.02) (0.05) (0.02) (0.05) (0.05)

University in 1517 -0.31*** -0.22** -0.14 -0.29** -0.22* -0.20(0.09) (0.10) (0.11) (0.11) (0.12) (0.12)

Latin Books pre-1517 -0.00 -0.00 -0.02 -0.01 -0.02** -0.02***(0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01)

Vernacular Books pre-1517 0.05 0.07** 0.12*** 0.07** 0.12*** 0.12***(0.03) (0.03) (0.02) (0.03) (0.02) (0.02)

Indicator: Lord Rule -0.17* 0.01 -0.19* -0.01 -0.01(0.10) (0.16) (0.09) (0.15) (0.16)

Indicator: Hanseatic 0.12 -0.12 0.13 -0.11 -0.12(0.09) (0.11) (0.10) (0.11) (0.11)

Principality Fixed Effects Yes Yes Yes

Observations 142 142 142 142 142 142

Table 7: City-level adoption of Reformation laws. Linear probability model with bi-nary dependent variable capturing whether or not a given city adopted an evangelischekirchenordnungen. “Firms 1510-1517” is the count of firms active in a city 1510-1517.“Firms 1510-1517 x Lord Rule” is the interaction with an indicator identifying citiessubject to the rule of a territorial lord. Distance to Wittenberg is measured in hundredsof kilometers. Latin and vernacular books are measured in thousands. All specificationscontrol for LN Population as of 1500. All specifications cluster standard errors at theprincipality level. The sample is restricted to the set of historically German-speakingcities with population recorded for 1500 in Bairoch, Batou, and Chevre (1988).

timates from 2SLS regressions and Panel B presents estimates from IV probit regressions

estimated via maximum likelihood. The 2SLS regressions indicate that an additional

firm active 1508-1517 was associated with a 15% to 20% greater likelihood of a city

passing a reformation law. For comparison, columns 5 and 6 show that every additional

100 kilometers of distance from Wittenberg was associated with a 9%-14% decrease in

the chance of passing a law. The IV probit regressions estimate that an additional firm

was associated with roughly a 40% increase in the likelihood of passing a Reformation

law. The differences in these estimates are driven by the identifying functional form

assumptions implicit in these estimators.

Finally, without advancing any causal claims, we estimate a survival model to quantify

38

Panel A: 2SLS Estimates - Dependent Variable Passage of Reformation Law 1518-1554

Law Law Law Law Law Law(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Firms 1508-1517 0.20*** 0.14** 0.14* 0.15** 0.17 0.18**(0.07) (0.07) (0.08) (0.07) (0.11) (0.07)

Firms 1498-1507 -0.11 -0.09 -0.09 -0.10 -0.11 -0.12(0.08) (0.07) (0.07) (0.07) (0.10) (0.08)

Latin Media pre-1517 -0.04 -0.02 -0.02 -0.02 -0.03 -0.03(0.10) (0.07) (0.07) (0.08) (0.08) (0.07)

Vernacular Media pre-1517 -0.21*** -0.12 -0.11 -0.13 -0.15 -0.15*(0.06) (0.08) (0.10) (0.09) (0.12) (0.09)

Religious Media pre-1517 0.58*** 0.55*** 0.56*** 0.47** 0.43**(0.18) (0.21) (0.22) (0.21) (0.21)

Indicator Pre-1517 Printing 0.02 0.01 0.06 0.08(0.14) (0.14) (0.14) (0.15)

Indicator: Lord Rule 0.03 -0.09 -0.08(0.10) (0.08) (0.07)

Indicator: Hanseatic -0.03 -0.08 -0.07(0.10) (0.09) (0.07)

Distance to Wittenberg -0.09*** -0.14***(0.03) (0.03)

Lat, Long, Lat x Long Yes

Observations 142 142 142 142 142 142F Statistic on 1st Stage IV 4.21 4.70 8.68 6.98 9.96 7.74

Panel B: IV Probit Marginal Effects - Dependent Variable Passage of Reformation Law 1518-1554

Law Law Law Law Law Law(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Firms 1508-1517 0.44*** 0.41*** 0.41*** 0.43*** 0.49*** 0.51***(0.10) (0.10) (0.13) (0.10) (0.12) (0.10)

Table 8: IV estimates of the relationship between media market competition and theadoption of formal legal reform. Panel A presents 2SLS estimates with the outcome city-level adoption of Reformation laws 1518-1555. The binary dependent variable captureswhether or not a given city adopted an evangelische kirchenordnungen between the 1517publication of Luther’s Theses and the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. “Firms 1508-1517” isthe count of firms active in a city 1508-1517 and is instrumented with printer deaths1508-1517. Distance to Wittenberg is measured in hundreds of kilometers. Latin andvernacular books are measured in thousands. All specifications control for LN Populationas of 1500. All specifications cluster standard errors at the principality level. Panel Bpresents marginal effects from IV probit regressions estimated with ML. The controlsand specifications in Panel B match the corresponding column in Panel A.

the relationship between exposure to Protestant media and the propensity of a city to

adopt a Reformation laws. Table 9 shows the results of fitting a discrete time duration

model to explain how the timing of the passage of Reformation laws was related to local

39

exposure to Protestant ideas in the media. The coefficients in Table 9 are odds ratios and

indicate that doubling the cumulative output of Protestant and vernacular books would

have about a 30% increase in the odds of getting a law while a doubling of the Catholic

books would result in a 40% decrease in the odds of getting a law. For exposition, prior

to estimation the measures of media exposure (Protestant and Catholic) are transformed

by a base-2 log so that the coefficients capture the estimated effect of scaling the variable

by a factor of two on the odds of passing a law.

Table 9 also provides evidence of spillovers in legislation across cities. The signifi-

cant coefficient on the spatially lagged dependent variable at time t − 1 in the second

specfication suggests that the probability of passing a law in a given period increases

when neighbors passed a law in the previous period, independent of their own exposure

to Protestant media. The spatial weighting matrix used to operationalize this test was

constructed by a Voronoi tessellation using Euclidean distance. Cities that share a bor-

der in the Voronoi diagram are considered neighbors. The interpretation of the estimate

on the spatially weighted lagged dependent variable is complicated since it depends on

both how many neighbors a city had and what percent passed a law in the previous

period. However, the parameter estimate clearly shows that there is a positive spatial

autocorrelation between a city’s neighbors’ having passed one or more laws and that city

passing a law in the subsequent period.

More formally, Table 9 presents estimates of the hazard rate:

h(t,X) = Pr(T = ti | T ≥ ti, Xt)

defined as the probability that a city i passes a law, the event T , at time ti conditional

on survival – i.e. city not having already passed a law – and observable, time-varying

coefficients, Xt. As above, the sample starts at 1517 and ends at 1600. All cities that have

not passed a law at 1600 are assumed to be censored. We follow the standard approach

in the event history analysis literature and use a logit model to obtain our estimates.48

The distance from Wittenberg is a continuous variable measured in kilometers. As such

it is estimated to be close to 1. For every kilometer further away from Wittenberg a city

is the odds of passing a Reformation law decrease by a little less than 1%. Imperial Free

Cities have a 150% higher odds of passing a law.

We include as potential explanatory variables the cumulative number of Protestant,

48See Beck et al. [1998] We also tried the complementary log-log (cloglog) model and frailty modelswith normal and gamma distributed heterogeneity [Meyer, 1990]. The cloglog model provided almostidentical results to the logit model while the assumption of unobserved heterogeneity of the frailty modelswas rejected. This suggests that the baseline hazard model captures the relevant sources of variation.

40

Table 9: Duration model for time until a Reformation law is passed

(1) (2)t 1.14** 1.13**

(0.06) (0.06)t2 0.99*** 1.00***

(0.00) (0.00)t3 1.00*** 1.00***

(0.00) (0.00)log2(cumulative prot)t−1 1.27** 1.26*

(0.15) (0.15)log2(cumulative cath)t−1 0.60*** 0.59***

(0.07) (0.07)log2(cumulative vernac)t−1 1.35** 1.37**

(0.20) (0.20)Population 1.03 1.03

(0.03) (0.03)Distance from Wittenberg 0.99*** 0.99***

(0.00) (0.00)Imperial Free City 2.42* 2.41**

(1.09) (1.06)W ′Yt−1 3.35**

(1.63)N 6770 6770

Coefficients are odds ratios. Standard errors clustered at the city level are in parentheses

* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01

41

Catholic, and non-religious vernacular texts up to time t − 1. We include as a measure

of city-level population linearly interpolated values from estimates at 1500 and 1600.

Therefore, this is equivalent to including linear trends with different slopes and levels for

each city. We include the distance to Wittenberg and an indicator variable indicating

whether or not the city was an Imperial Free City. To capture the time dependence of

duration we include a cubic polynomial.49

8 Conclusion

The print media revolution dramatically lowered the cost of transmitting ideas. The

Protestant Reformation was the first mass movement to exploit the new media. Previous

research has not documented the diffusion of Protestantism in quantitative terms.

We use new data on the universe of known books and pamphlets printed in Germany

to document the diffusion of Protestant ideas across time and space. We find variations

in the number of firms serving and competing in city media markets were associated

with variations in the diffusion of Protestant ideas in the 1500s. The precise timing

of the deaths of master printers is used to isolate variations in competition that are

plausibly exogenous to underlying city characteristics that made locations more or less

predisposed to the adoption of the new ideas. The evidence also indicates that the

diffusion of Protestant media preceded city-level institutional change. The relationship

between exposure to the media and these institutional changes is the subject of our

on-going research.

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