TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Nunziata, Luca
AU  - Rocco, Lorenzo
        TI  - A Tale of Minorities: Evidence on Religious Ethics and Entrepreneurship from Swiss Census Data
        PY  - 2014/Feb/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 7976
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp7976
        AB  - Does Protestantism favour the market economy more than Catholicism does? We provide a novel quasi-experimental way to answer this question by comparing Protestant and Catholic minorities using Swiss census data from 1970 to 2000. Exploiting the strong adhesion of religious minorities to their confession's ethical principles and the historical determination of the geographical distribution of confessions across Swiss cantons, we find that Protestantism is associated with a significantly higher propensity for entrepreneurship. The estimated difference ranges between 2.3 and 4.4 percentage points. Our findings are robust to a number of robustness checks, including a placebo test.
        KW  - Protestantism
KW  - culture
KW  - religion
KW  - self-employment
KW  - entrepreneurship
KW  - Catholicism
KW  - Switzerland
        ER  -