Protestantism and Effort Expenditure on the Battlefield: Soldier- Level Evidence from World War II * Tony Beatton Ahmed Skali Benno Torgler University of Queensland Royal Melbourne Institute of Queensland University of Technology Technology and CREMA This version: September 2019 Abstract Can religious beliefs explain effort provision in salient settings? We track 15,421 soldiers in Nazi Germany’s armies from the start of World War II in September 1939 to the surrender of Germany in May 1945. To measure effort, we use military decorations, promotions, injuries, and death as proxies. Our cross-sectional and soldier-by-month panel (N = 666,709) results indicate that Protestants out-perform Catholics, and Calvinists out-perform Lutherans. Instrumental variables regressions support a causal interpretation of these results. We also find that Calvinists, whose belief system favours early resolution of uncertainty about salvation, exert more effort early on in the war. Differences in commitment to the Nazi ideology and discrimination against Catholic soldiers do not appear to drive our results. Our results suggest an important role for the horizontal transmission of work ethic-enhancing norms of behaviour: Catholics from historically Protestant districts exert more effort than Catholics from Catholic districts. JEL Classification: N34, N44, Z12 Keywords: Protestant Work Ethic; World War II; Effort; Nazi Germany; Awards * Corresponding author: Ahmed Skali (
[email protected]). We gratefully acknowledge thoughts and comments from Larbi Alaoui, Robert Barro, Saumitra Jha, Stephanie Heger, Mark Koyama, Wang Sheng Lee, Ananta Neelim, Jared Rubin, Yannay Spitzer, David Stadelmann, Hans-Joachim Voth, and conference and seminar audiences at the 2019 Association for the Study of Religion, Economy and Culture, 2017 Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics conference, and 2017 Australasian Public Choice Conference, Queensland University of Technology, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.