Religions and inventions: Long-run Evidence for Spain
Francesco Cinnirella, Ifo Institute; Alireza Naghavi, University of Bologna; Giovanni Prarolo, University of Bologna
Abstract
Religions go hand in hand with different attitudes toward economic issues, such as education, property right protection and attitude towards inventive activity. The Spanish medieval history presents a natural experiment to study how the long lasting presence of different religious denominations, i.e. Christians and Muslims, could have shaped economic outcomes, specifically the production of long-lasting patents. Moreover, the coexistence of such diverse religious doctrines could lead to complementarity or substitutability between religion-related inventive skills, leaving the final answer to an empirical exploration. We address this issue by means of a novel dataset containing detailed data on yearly cell-level (10X10 Km) information on Christian and Muslim presence and data on innovation/patents during the industrial revolution.