Religion and Innovation

By Roland Bénabou, Davide Ticchi, A. Vindigni. Social Science Research Network, 2015

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In earlier work (Benabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between religiosity and a broad set of pro- or anti-innovation attitudes in all five waves of the World Values Survey (1980 to 2005). We thus relate eleven indicators of individual openness to innovation, broadly defined (e.g., attitudes toward science and technology, new versus old ideas, change, risk taking, personal agency, imagination and independence in children) to five different measures of religiosity, including beliefs and attendance. We control for all standard socio-demographics as well as country, year and denomination fixed effects. Across the fifty-two estimated specifications, greater religiosity is almost uniformly and very significantly associated to less favorable views of innovation.

Subfields: Demography, Information Systems, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0896b6e42ee489f68ddfaea243a1ddf8f7a9bf94

Citations in the corpus

• Is green the new gold? Venture capital and green entrepreneurship (2016, unknown): “For other works using WVS data see e.g. Benabou et al. (2015) and Deaton (2008).”