Losing Their Religion

Abstract

This paper studies whether governments can change social norms that constrain women’s education and work, and through which mechanism. Albania’s 1967 religion ban, which created the world’s first atheist state, provides an extreme natural experiment: religious practice was outlawed nationwide, but a 1948 classification of historic monuments determined which religious buildings remained standing. We find larger increases in female employment and schooling where no monument survived. The public visibility of the old religious order appears to be the mechanism: effects are largest where no monument remained, smaller with rural-only monuments, and smallest with urban monuments; they also decline as monument count rises, regardless of denomination. We establish how social norms can outlive formal authority.