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When Does Christian Religion Matter for Entrepreneurial Activity? The Contingent Effect of a Country’s Investments into Knowledge

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Abstract

This study furthers scholarship on the religion-entrepreneurship link by proposing that (1) aspects of a country’s religious profile impact individual entrepreneurial activity differently and (2) that a country’s level of investments in knowledge serves as a contingency factor in this milieu. Our cross-level analyses of data from 9,266 individuals and 27 predominantly Christian countries support the second, but not the first suggestion. The study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of religion’s role for entrepreneurship and bridges the literatures on religion and knowledge-based entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the study provides evidence of the effects of religion above and beyond the effects of national culture.

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Notes

  1. Block et al. (2013a) used this dataset to study the decision to take over a business versus starting a new one.

  2. About one-third of the interviews in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia were conducted face to face.

  3. Both samples were similar regarding respondent age (Flash EB: mean = 44.12, SD = 10.79, GEM 2006: mean = 42.22, SD = 12.59). While the Flash EB comprised a higher share of females at working age (55 %) than GEM (44 %), both datasets were close to the equal female-male ratio estimated by the World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency 2012) for the countries in our sample.

  4. The interpretation of interactions in logit models differs substantially from regular OLS models. In non-linear regression, the effect of the interaction is a function of the interaction coefficient and—unlike in OLS regression—of the coefficient of each interacted variable and of the values of all covariates. The magnitude and sign of an interaction can thus vary across observations. The coefficient alone is an insufficient basis for conclusions about the interaction’s sign and significance. The magnitude and even sign of the effect can differ across observations. Moreover, the statistical significance of the interaction cannot be determined from the regression output, but is conditional on the covariates. Ignoring these differences, many researchers in the fields of, for instance, strategic management (Hoetker 2007) and economics (Norton et al. 2004) have misinterpreted interactions in logit models.

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Acknowledgments

Valuable comments by two anonymous reviewers and editorial guidance by Domènec Melé are gratefully acknowledged. We also thank Sarah Drakopoulou Dodd and Bruno Dyck for helpful comments on prior versions of the paper.

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Parboteeah, K.P., Walter, S.G. & Block, J.H. When Does Christian Religion Matter for Entrepreneurial Activity? The Contingent Effect of a Country’s Investments into Knowledge. J Bus Ethics 130, 447–465 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2239-z

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