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.

While income inequality in Germany considerably increased in the years before 2005, this trend stopped after 2005. We address the question of what factors were responsible for the break in the inequality trend after 2005. Our analysis suggests that income inequality in Germany did not continue to rise after 2005 for the following reasons. First, we observe that the general rise in wage inequality that explained a lot of the inequality increase before 2005, became less steep (but did not stop) after 2005. Second, despite further increases in wage inequality after 2005, inequality in annual labour incomes did not increase further after 2005 because increased within‐year employment opportunities compensated otherwise rising inequality in annual labour incomes. Third, income inequality did not fall in a more marked way after 2005 because also the middle and the upper part of the distribution benefited from the employment boom after 2006. Finally, we provide evidence that the effect of a wide range of other factors that are often suspected to have influenced the distribution such as capital incomes, household structures, population ageing, changes in the tax and transfer system and the financial crisis of 2008 did not significantly alter the distribution after 2005.

Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW. Abstract. There is still considerable dispute about the magnitude of labor supply elasticities. While differences in micro and macro estimates are recently attributed to frictions and adjustment costs, we show that relatively low labor supply elasticities derived from microeconometric models can also be explained by modeling assumptions with respect to wages. Specifically, we estimate 3,456 structural labor supply models each representing a plausible combination of frequently made choices. While most model assumptions do not systematically affect labor supply elasticities, our analysis shows that the results are very sensitive to the treatment of wages. In particular, the often-made but highly restrictive independence assumption between preferences and wages is key. To overcome this restriction, we propose a flexible estimation strategy that nests commonly used models. We show that loosening the exogeneity assumption leads to labor supply elasticities that are much higher. Structural Labor SupplyJEL Classification: C25, C52, H31, J22

Diethylenetriamines and diethanolamines carrying a carbamate‐protected amine and peripheral reactive units are valuable synthetic building blocks for hydrogel crosslinkers or biohybrid materials because they enable orthogonal functionalization. However, the carbamate unit leads to restricted rotational mobility, affecting both physical and chemical properties of the amines. To gain insight into the rotational behavior of such systems, a series of carbamate‐protected amines with different peripheral units was synthesized and their rotational barriers were studied by dynamic NMR measurements and electronic structure calculations. Experimentally observed barriers were in the range of 61 to 66 kJ/mol and were mostly dependent on the size of the peripheral groups rather than their hydrogen bonding ability. Density functional theory (DFT) and MP2 calculations yielded barriers of similar order of magnitude, albeit differing in the overall trends. The data suggest that for improved theoretical estimates of free energy barriers ab initio molecular dynamics simulations in explicit solvent would be required.