The protestant ethic and entrepreneurship: inside the black box
研究新教如何通过教育和个体主义价值观影响创业概率，基于神圣罗马帝国历史宗教少数群体数据，发现中介效应解释约26%的总影响。
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.