Behind the Wall: What Remains of the “Communist Legacy” in Contemporary Europe

This part of the question is equal also for the following quotes. As a consequence I will not report it, but I will only quote the sentences to be graded.

Empirical evidence of this is also found for China (Migheli 2010).

On other effects of pro-market reforms on household well-being see also Mogstad and Pronzato (2012).

This part of the question is equal also for the following quotes. As a consequence I will not report it, but I will only quote the sentences to be graded.

I wish to thank an anonymous referee for highlighting this methodological issue and for suggesting its discussion in the paper.

This part of the question is equal also for the following quotes. As a consequence I will not report it, but I will only quote the sentences to be graded.

In reality I control for a stable relationship, i.e. married or not married but living together.

It is possible to claim that as atheism could be a legacy of the communist past, the introduction of the dummy for being atheist is improper. I acknowledge that this may be a valid point, but I claim that factors other than political doctrines might have affected the religious orientation of people in the two blocs, leading to the current situation in which Eastern Europeans are on average more likely to be atheist than western citizens are. The following finding supports my claim: the large majority of eastern countries belong to the Orthodox denomination, as Greece does. The orientation of Greeks and Eastern Europeans towards religion does not differ significantly in my sample. This means that Greeks are on average as atheist as Eastern Europeans are. Therefore, to claim that atheism in Eastern Europe is just a legacy of communism is incorrect. For this reason I control also for this variable and claim that this does not bias the analysis, but rather reinforces its results.

However this is just a possible interpretation and the present analysis does not offer any supportive or contrary evidence.

Of course the implementation of this high principle has often failed also in communist countries, but I have to account for (1) some indoctrination effect and (2) some successful implementation of the ideology.

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This is compulsory, given that each country-specific control takes only one value for each country. Since the dummy for Western Europe would then coincide with a dummy for Spain, this dummy would be perfectly collinear, and therefore has to be dropped.

In other words this shows that, selecting some criterion, it is always possible to split the countries in different groups. Nevertheless a simple and non-pondered criterion (such as the easy geo-historical division between former communist and western European countries) may generate results that are intriguing, but are not robust to further, more ‘scientific’ inquiries.

Risk aversion would (at least partially) explain why women (who are generally more risk-averse than men—see Andreoni and Vesterlund 2001) prefer more regulation than men.

Regardless of the quality of the job and (above all) of the food, and the quality of delivery of the latter (with long queues), people had relatively equal access to both.