Religion and entrepreneurship: a gendered multi-country analysis

Despite a growing interest in the influence of religion on economic growth, research on how religion influences an individual's decision for entrepreneurship/self-employment is limited. Our study examines this largely unexplored association between religion and entrepreneurship using multi-level modeling. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to use the latest wave 7 of the World Values Survey (51 countries) and the joint World Values Survey and European Values Study Survey (81 countries) dataset from 2017 to 2021 to examine this association. We also examine gender differences in entrepreneurship across different regions. Besides religious denominations, our study examines several other individual and country-level determinants of entrepreneurship such as age, education, ethics such as hard work and the corruption index. Our main findings illustrate that while belonging to some religions is conducive to becoming an entrepreneur/self-employed, this is not the case for all religions. Further, notable gender differences can be found in terms of entrepreneurship. Among the different religions, Muslim females have a lower likelihood of being self-employed. Our study provides key policy insights. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.