Let Bygones be Bygones? Political Regimes and Personalities in Germany

Markus Pannenberg, Tim Friehe and Michael Wedow

VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This paper investigates the influence of political regimes on personality, using the separation of Germany into the socialist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. We establish significant differences between former GDR and FRG residents regarding important attributes of personality (particularly neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, and the locus of control). To understand the influence of the GDR's political regime on personality, we test an important channel by exploiting regional variation in the number of unofficial state-security collaborators across East German counties. Our results indicate that local surveillance intensity is an important determinant of the personality of former GDR citizens indeed. The observed significant differences in personality imply that former citizens of the GDR have economic prospects very different from former FRG citizens and help to understand behavioral differences established in the prior literature.

JEL-codes: D03 D12 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc15:112841

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