The protestant ethic and entrepreneurship: inside the black box

Luca Nunziata and Lorenzo Rocco

Small Business Economics, 2024, vol. 62, issue 4, No 2, 1285-1313

Abstract: Abstract We provide one of the first investigations of the cultural and value dimensions through which Protestantism affects entrepreneurship by focusing on the historically predetermined religious minorities residing in the regions of the former Holy Roman Empire. By exploiting the minorities’ strong attachment to religious ethic, we find that Protestantism significantly affects the probability to be an entrepreneur and that the effect is relatively larger when we consider larger enterprises. A formal mediation analysis suggests that among the rich set of individual characteristics and values typically associated with entrepreneurship available in our data, the dimensions that mediate the effect of Protestantism are education and a taste for individualism. In particular, such mediating factors explain around 26% of the total effect of Protestantism on entrepreneurship.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Religion; Protestantism; Catholicism; Culture; Value; Mediation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 Z12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-023-00838-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:sbusec:v:62:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s11187-023-00838-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-023-00838-3

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().