Post-Materialism as a Cultural Factor Influencing Entrepreneurial Activity Across Nations

Abstract

The study of the determinants of entrepreneurship at the country levelhas been dominated by economic influences. The relative stability of differences in levels of entrepreneurship across coun-tries suggeststhat other forces such as certain institutional and/or cultural factors are at play. The objective of this paper is to explore how post-materialism explains differences in entrepreneurial activity across countries. Entrepreneurial activity is defined as the percent of a country?s popula-tion that is self-employed, using a broad definition that also includes CEOs of both unincorporated and legally incorporated establishments. The measure for post-materialism is based upon Ingle-hart?s four-item post-materialism index. Because of the known interactions between economic and cultural factors found in previous research, a set of economic and cultural factors is includedto provide a clearer picture of the independent role post-materialism plays in prediction of self-employment levels. In particular, education, life satisfaction, church attendance and political (left or right) extremism are used as control variables in our analyses using data of 14 OECD countries over in recent period. Findings confirm the significanceof post-materialism in predicting self-employment even when controllingfor economic and cultural factors. However, strong covariation betweenpost-materialism and other cultural factors makes it difficult to clearly discriminate be-tween the effects.

Keywords: cultural economics, entrepreneurship, macro-economic analyses of economic development, comparative studies of countries

JEL Classification: M, L20, P52, Z1, M13, O57