Good-Bye Lenin (Or Not?): The Effect of Communism on People's Preferences

Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln and Alberto Alesina

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosity of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. This paper tests whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences. We exploit the experiment of German separation and reunification to establish exogeneity of the economic system. We find that, after German reunification, East Germans are more in favor of state intervention than West Germans. This effect is especially strong for older cohorts. We further find that East Germans' preferences converge toward those of West Germans. It will take one to two generations for preferences to converge completely.

Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (430)

Published in American Economic Review

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4553032/alesinassrn_goodbyelenin.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Good bye Lenin (or not?): The effect of Communism on people's preferences (2005)
Working Paper: Good bye Lenin (or not?): The Effect of Communism on People's Preferences (2005)
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:hrv:faseco:4553032

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().