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oai:figshare.com:article/33802885 2026-09-15T15:27:50Z portal_1197 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Data for Social cohesion, religious beliefs, and the effect of Protestantism on suicide Sascha O. Becker (9332371) Ludger Woessmann (3964193) Suicide -- Economic aspects Suicide -- Religious aspects Suicide -- Prevention Suicide -- Social aspects Suicide -- Statistics Migrated from ePrints In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 Prussian counties in 1816-21 and 1869-71, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental-variable model finds that Protestantism had a substantial positive effect on suicide. Results are corroborated in first-difference models. Tests relating to the two mechanisms based on historical church-attendance data and modern suicide data suggest that the sociological channel plays the more important role.<br><br>Data record consists of 13 Stata data files, in .do, .log and .dta format, and a readme file. All analyses were performed in Stata/SE 14.2, and all variables are labeled in the respective Stata *.dta files. 2019-02-27T00:00:00Z Dataset Dataset 10.82444/warw.33802885.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_for_Social_cohesion_religious_beliefs_and_the_effect_of_Protestantism_on_suicide/33802885 CC BY 4.0