"While the careers of secret agents have inspired many genres of popular culture, relatively little research has been carried out until now on spying as a profession. Through the lens of personnel management, the authors offer a unique and compelling analysis of secret service employee...

We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and administrative features of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with...