Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show...

What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust? To answer this question, we use the reunification of Germany as a natural experiment and study the post-reunification trajectory of convergence with regard to individuals' trust and risk, as well...

Herausforderung (industrieller) Strukturwandel -- Anlässe und Trigger für Kooperationen sowie Einflussfaktoren -- Arten von Kooperationen -- Kooperation, Vertrauen und Kontrolle -- Kooperationsgestaltung in der Praxis -- Beziehungen außerhalb der Wirtschaft -- Phasen und Stufen der...

‘This extremely timely publication addresses an important knowledge gap in this era of shifting economic power and global imbalances. Entrepreneurship is central to the growing success of the wider African economy and understanding the importance of trust within developing relationships can...

The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals' attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique...

We establish an inverse relationship between family ties, generalized trust and political participation. The more individuals rely on the family as a provider of services, insurance, transfer of resources, the lower is civic engagement and political participation. The latter, together with...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

A vast literature has investigated the relationship between trust and aggregate economic performance. We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs available...