Protestant Ethic and Entrepreneurship: Religious Minorities in the Holy Roman Empire

The Protestant Ethic and Entrepreneurship:  Evidence from Religious Minorities in the Former Holy Roman Empire.  By Luca Nunziata, Lorenzo Rocco. European Journal of Political Economy
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2017.04.001

Abstract: We investigate the effect of Protestantism versus Catholicism on the decision to become an entrepreneur in former Holy Roman Empire regions. Our research design exploits religious minorities' strong attachment to religious ethic and the predetermined historical determination of religious minorities' geographical distribution in the 1500 s as a result of the “cuius regio eius religio” (whose realm, his religion) rule. We find that today Protestantism increases the probability to be an entrepreneur by around 5 percentage points with respect to Catholicism, a result that survives to a battery of robustness checks. We explicit the assumptions underlying the identification strategy and provide an extensive testing of their validity by making use of several European datasets.

JEL classification:     J24; Z12; J21; Z13

Keywords:    Entrepreneurship; Religion; Culture; Protestantism; Catholicism