TY - RPRT AU - Benabou, Roland AU - Ticchi, Davide AU - Vindigni, Andrea TI - Religion and Innovation PY - 2015/Apr/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 8975 UR - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp8975 AB - In earlier work (Bénabou, 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. KW - values KW - attitudes KW - beliefs KW - religion KW - growth KW - risk-taking KW - ideas KW - technical progress KW - science KW - creativity KW - innovation KW - tolerance KW - dogma KW - culture ER -