For many decades culture has been considered to have a significant impact on the productivity of people. This study observes for the Russian Federation, on the basis of the ARENA study by Sreda, the impact of the share of the most prominent religious groups on economic output as well as 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...

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...