Abstract
One of the most powerful cultural transformations of the 20$^{th}$ 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 effect of Christian missions, whether Protestant, Catholic, Presbyterian or Methodist, on local economic development, whether during contemporary or colonial times. However, some results suggest that Christian missions may have had a positive effect on human capital formation. There may thus be contexts in which missions promoted human capital accumulation without this necessarily translating into local economic development.