One of the most powerful cultural transformations of the 20th century has been the dramatic expansion of Christianity outside of Europe. This unique historical process was facilitated by vast Christian missionary efforts. In this paper, we study the economic effects of Christian missions in Ghana. We rely on six distinct identification strategies that exploit exogenous variations in Christian missionary expansion from 1828 to 1932. We find no association between Christian missions, whether Protestant, Catholic, Presbyterian or Methodist, and local economic development, whether during contemporary or colonial times. However, some results suggest that Christian missions might have had a positive effect on human capital formation. There might thus be contexts in which missions promoted human capital accumulation without this necessarily translating into local economic development.

20 世纪最强大的文化变革之一是基督教在欧洲以外的急剧扩张。这一独特的历史进程得益于大量的基督教传教士努力。在本文中，我们研究了基督教在加纳传教的经济影响。我们依赖六种不同的识别策略，这些策略利用了 1828 年至 1932 年基督教传教士扩张的外生变化。我们发现基督教传教士（无论是新教、天主教、长老会或卫理公会）与当地经济发展（无论是在当代还是殖民时期）之间没有关联。然而，一些结果表明基督教宣教可能对人力资本形成产生了积极影响。