Education Economics from a Historical Perspective

The organization of the Prussian school system still affects the German education system of today. Against the background of end-of-nineteenth-Prussia this thesis analyzes how education funding emerges in a federal system and how it affects prosperity and nation building in a setting of religious and ethno-linguistic heterogeneity. The econometric anal-yses are based on census data, originally collected by the Royal Statistical Office of Prussia and partly digitized for this thesis. The thesis consists of four distinct empirical analyses on educational economics from a historical perspective, two chapters investigating the consequences of educational inputs and two chapters examining the determinants of educational provision and performance in nineteenth-century Prussia.