Surveillance and Self-Control

Deborah Cobb-Clark, Sarah C. Dahmann, Daniel A Kamhöfer and Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch

The Economic Journal, 2024, vol. 134, issue 660, 1666-1682

Abstract: This paper studies important determinants of adult self-control using population-representative data and exploiting Germany’s division as quasi-experimental variation. We find that former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans and provide evidence for government surveillance as a possible underlying mechanism. We thereby demonstrate that institutional factors can shape people’s self-control. Moreover, we find that self-control increases linearly with age. In contrast to previous findings for children, there is no gender gap in adult self-control and family background does not predict self-control.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/uead111 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2024:i:660:p:1666-1682.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().