Networks of Church and State that originated in premodern times played an important role as conduits for the transmission of cultural values that have endured into the present and set the economic history of China apart from that of Europe. The imprints of those networks, which preceded the...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

Can Protestantism make people more honest? If yes, what does this mean for corporate behaviors and economic performance? Marshalling large and unique datasets on the 1920 Protestant diffusion in China, and the financial reports of about 125,000 Chinese industrial firms from 1999 to 2007, we find...

From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China―an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and of Chinese scientific works between 1501 and 1780, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits...

What made finance develop in the West but not in China? We argue that long before modern finance, China chose to rely on the kinship-based Confucian clan, whereas the West chose the corporate entity combined with impersonal instruments, to deal with the challenges of interpersonal risk sharing...

Informal finance plays an important role in transitional economies with weak legal institutions, like China. As a major informal finance instrument, trade credit relies on informal institutions and enforcement. We argue that religion enhances the ethical climate in which firms do business, and...

This paper examines the impact of religious belief on the trust in central and local governments among Chinese people, based on micro-level data from a recent national representative survey. To mitigate problems of endogeneity, we use instrument variable (IV) regression with the number of...

This article explores religion’s contribution to the cultural capital of the modern market economy. Networks of Church and State that originated in premodern times played an important role as conduits for the transmission of cultural values that have endured into the present and set the...

The influence of religious beliefs on investment is interesting and important in literature. We use a large dataset with detailed information on the worship places of the five largest religious groups in China to study the relationship between local religious beliefs and individual financial...