We conduct trust games in three villages in a northeastern Romanian commune. From 1775-1919, these villages were arbitrarily assigned to opposite sides of the Austrian and Ottoman/Russian border despite being located seven kilometers apart. All three villages were ruled by outsiders to Romania, with Russian and Ottoman fiscal institutions being more rapacious. We conjecture that this history, combined with historical selective migration, contributed to a culture of trust of outsiders (relative to co-villagers) on the Austrian side of the border. Our design permits us to test this conjecture, and more generally, whether historically-derived cultural norms are transmitted intergenerationally. We find that participants on the Austrian side that also have family roots in the village are indeed more likely to trust outsiders but less likely to trust co-villagers.

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves can be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple theoretical model of informational spillovers and learning, and then test it empirically using an approach inspired by the gravity model. We find evidence of informational spillovers both with respect to both political and economic liberalization. While the previous literature has focused only on economic reform, we find that the spillovers are particularly important for political changes.

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Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple theoretical model and then test it empirically. Our results confirm the presence of informational spillovers with respect to political liberalization but offer little support for informational spillovers with respect to economic reforms.