The culture that was East German

This paper studies important determinants of adult self-control using population-representative data and exploiting Germany’s division as quasi-experimental variation. We find that former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans and provide evidence for government surveillance as a possible underlying mechanism. We thereby demonstrate that institutional factors can shape people’s self-control. Moreover, we find that self-control increases linearly with age. In contrast to previous findings for children, there is no gender gap in adult self-control and family background does not predict self-control.

That is from the Economic Journal by Deborah A Cobb-Clark, Sarah C Dahmann, Daniel A Kamhöfer, and Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.