The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany
Andreas Lichter,
Max Löffler and
Sebastian Siegloch
Journal of the European Economic Association, 2021, vol. 19, issue 2, 741-789
Abstract:
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 an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the long-term, post-reunification effect of government surveillance. We find that a higher spying density led to persistently lower levels of interpersonal and institutional trust in post-reunification Germany. We also find substantial and long-lasting economic effects of Stasi surveillance, resulting in lower income, higher exposure to unemployment, and lower self-employment.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvaa009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany (2019)
Working Paper: The long-term costs of government surveillance: Insights from stasi spying in East Germany (2019)
Working Paper: The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany (2016)
Working Paper: The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany (2016)
Working Paper: The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany (2016)
Working Paper: The Economic Costs of Mass Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany (2015)
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:jeurec:v:19:y:2021:i:2:p:741-789.
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Romain Wacziarg
More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from European Economic Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press (joanna.bergh@oup.com).