Experienced inequality and preferences for redistribution
By Christopher Roth, Johannes Wohlfart. Journal of Public Economics, 2018
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We examine in how far people’s experiences of income inequality affect their preferences for redistribution. We use several large nationally representative datasets to provide evidence that people who have experienced more inequality while growing up are less in favor of redistribution, after controlling for income, demographics, unemployment experiences and current macro-economic conditions. They are also less likely to consider the prevailing distribution of incomes to be unfair, suggesting that inequality experiences affect the reference point about what is a fair division of overall income. Finally, we conduct an experiment to show that individuals randomly exposed to environments promoting inequality in the experience stage of the experiment redistribute less in a subsequent behavioral measure.
Subfields: Demography, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bd77de33576da6bafe00e789479b60d55d679a2
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In Demography
In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- The paradox of inequality: income inequality and belief in meritocracy go hand in hand (2019, background): “…experiences, news reporting and statistics about (growing) inequality are not likely to change people’s perspectives, nor lead them to develop empathy for the plight of unseen others living across the income divide (Tropp and Pettigrew, 2005; Newman, 2014; Roth and Wohlfart, 2017; Edmiston, 2018).”