IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lmu/muenar/20118.html

The shadows of the socialist past: Lack of self-reliance hinders entrepreneurship

Author

Listed:
  • Bauernschuster, Stefan
  • Falck, Oliver
  • Gold, Robert
  • Heblich, Stephan

Abstract

We provide empirical evidence that the experience of a socialist regime leads to a lack of self-reliance by comparing East and West Germans conditional on regional differences in current economic development. This meaningful lack of self-reliance persists after the regime’s breakdown and hinders the development of an entrepreneurial spirit, which might hamper the transition process. Since East Germany adopted the formal institutions of a market economy quasi overnight when reunifying with West Germany, we avoid simultaneity issues regarding current institutions and preferences. Further tentative evidence suggests that the socialist regime also affected the composition of the East German population by inducing selective migration before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Suggested Citation

  • Bauernschuster, Stefan & Falck, Oliver & Gold, Robert & Heblich, Stephan, 2012. "The shadows of the socialist past: Lack of self-reliance hinders entrepreneurship," Munich Reprints in Economics 20118, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:lmu:muenar:20118
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L29 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Other
    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • P39 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lmu:muenar:20118. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tamilla Benkelberg (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.