Climato-Economic Ecology of Entrepreneurship

To better understand what factors predict entrepreneurship across societies, we developed and tested a climato-economic model explaining how cultural freedom values and social institutions are both joint functions of thermal demands and societal wealth and subsequently predict entrepreneurship synergistically. By analyzing 93 societies’ archival data, we found support for our model. Thermal demands have positive relationships with entrepreneurship, cultural freedom values, and social institutions only in wealthy societies. While cultural freedom values, but not social institutions, mediate the interactive relationship of thermal demands and societal wealth with entrepreneurship, cultural freedom values and social institutions interact to predict entrepreneurship.