In 1958, the French philosopher Etienne Gilson observed that "painters are related to manual laborers by a deep-rooted affinity that nothing can eliminate," because painting was the one art in which the person who conceives the work is also necessarily the person who executes it. Conceptual...

In 1958, the French philosopher Etienne Gilson observed that "painters are related to manual laborers by a deep-rooted affinity that nothing can eliminate," because painting was the one art in which the person who conceives the work is also necessarily the person who executes it. Conceptual...

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...

Access to useful knowledge is crucial for fostering modern economic growth. We show, for the first time, that knowledge accumulated and stored in monasteries was useful for innovation. In 1866, anticlerical legislation in Italy led to the suppression of religious orders, the expropriation of...