Holy Cows and Spilt Milk: The Impact of Religious Conflict on Firm-Level Productivity

Jeanet Bentzen, Nina Boberg-Fazlic, Paul Sharp, Christian Skovsgaard and Christian Vedel

No 18679, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We consider the impact of non-violent religious conflict on firm-level productivity. We zoom in on a Protestant and otherwise very homogeneous country: early twentieth century Denmark. We exploit variation due to the emergence of pietist movements who fought for the hearts and minds of Danes. In the countryside, much of the religious debate concerned whether or not creameries - the main catalyst of the industrial revolution in Denmark - should be closed on Sundays in accordance with the Third Commandment. We construct a rich microlevel dataset for 964 creameries and combine this with various measures of the intensity of the religious conflict. Exploiting variation in preaching by a prominent religious figure, we provide plausibly causal evidence that religious conflict hampered firm-level productivity. Examining the mechanism, we proceed to demonstrate that the reduction in productivity is due to the religious conflict rather than whether or not the factory produced on Sundays.

Keywords: Dairying; Denmark (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N33 N34 O12 O13 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18679 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Holy Cows and Spilt Milk: The Impact of Religious Conflict on Firm-Level Productivity (2023)
Working Paper: Holy Cows and Spilt Milk - The Impact of Religious Conflict on Firm-Level Productivity (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:18679

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18679

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().