  This paper investigates whether ideological indoctrination by living in a
communist regime relates to low economic performance in a market economy. We
recruit North Korean refugees and measure their implicit bias against South
Korea by using the Implicit Association Test. Conducting double auction and
bilateral bargaining market experiments, we find that North Korean refugees
with a larger bias against the capitalistic society have lower expectations
about their earning potential, exhibit trading behavior with lower target
profits, and earn less profits. These associations are robust to conditioning
on correlates of preferences, human capital, and assimilation experiences.
