Following Max Weber’s seminal work, much recent work has turned to religious values to explain socio-economic developments. We present a test of Weber’s original thesis that addresses fundamental limitations of previous research. A novel method that builds on happiness research is used to...

We assess the organizational culture in the finance industry in relation to the global financial crisis (GFC) and consider the potential of cultural change to improve the financial sector. To avoid (response) biases, we build on the person-organization (P-O) fit literature and develop a novel,...

I propose and test a bottom-up channel through which trust between parties to an exchange can go on to affect comparative economic development of societies as a whole. My approach revolves around the autonomy that employers (principals) grant to workers (agents), which is a key feature of...

Over the centuries happiness, or more broadly, well-being has been subject of unremitting debate. Recently, measures of so-called subjective well-being (SWB; e.g. self-reported happiness) have gained prominence and are receiving increasing attention from scientists, policy makers and the public...

The income-leisure trade-off, whilst prominent in textbooks, is largely absent in the income-happiness debate. Multilevel or hierarchical linear modeling is introduced and used to investigate the income-leisure-happiness nexus. Leisure has a positive effect on happiness, but lowers the effect of...

Empirical work has refuted the prediction of new or endogenous growth theory that growth exhibits a scale effect: the rate of growth has not accelerated and larger countries do not grow faster than smaller countries do. The theoretical dimensions of this ‘scale effects problem' have been...

We open the black box of what goes on in firms in terms of management of their operations. Work autonomy is a key aspect of firm organization and we test the hypothesis that societal trust affects the level of autonomy that firms grant to their employees. Analysis of up to 189,213 individuals...

In a globalizing world, cross-national differences in values and business culture and understanding these differences become increasingly central to a range of managerial issues. Studies of cultural (dis)similarities in the values of managers (so-called managerial values) and the development of...