This paper examines the role of local attitudes towards gambling on corporate innovative activity. Using a county's Catholics-to-Protestants ratio as a proxy for local gambling preferences, we find that firms located in gambling-prone areas tend to undertake riskier projects, spend more on...

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...