Religious Belief and Firm R&D Investment

Abstract

In order to explore the influencing mechanism of entrepreneur's religious belief on firm R&D investment, this paper constructs a model on the basis of a game between an entrepreneur and researchers over the control right of R&D projects. We take researchers' concern on free inquiry as an intermediate variable. We find that the researcher's attention of free inquiry has a critical impact on the relationship between entrepreneur's religious belief and firm R&D investment. Specifically, our results show that no matter how much the entrepreneur hates risk, the firm will increase R&D investment only when the researchers pay enough attention to free inquiry. On the contrary, if researchers do not attach any importance to the academic spirit which is "free inquiry", corporate R&D investment is decreased with the enhancing of the degree of entrepreneur's risk aversion, namely the entrepreneurs who are religious, risk-aversive may try to reduce the R&D investment.