This paper seeks to study the long lasting effects of the Habsburg Empire's institutions on current trust on government entities, on the same territory. Towards this end, the authors use a micro dataset of the 2006 Life in Transition Survey (LiTS), collected by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in 29 countries between August and October 2006, that provides measures of trust and corruption in Eastern European countries. In each country, 1,000 households were surveyed, with 20 households coming from 50 different locations. They restrict the analysis to countries that are either successor states of the Habsburg Empire or neighboring countries thereof: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Hungary, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, they coded the location of each observation in the LiTS dataset in terms of its affiliation with the Habsburg Empire. A notable characteristic of the LiTS is that it requires respondents to declare the degree of intensity when answering questions.

Data collected from the Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) collected by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in 29 countries between August and October 2006; and other sources of information such as Hrvatski Povijesni Altlas (2003), Kinder and Hilgemann (2004), Leisering (2004), Magocsi (2002), Reden (1995), Rothaug (2001)