Redistributive choices and increasing income inequality: experimental evidence for income as a signal of deservingness

Why Do (Some) Ordinary Americans Support Tax Cuts for the Rich? Evidence From a Randomized Survey Experiment

“…For instance, Scheve and Stasavage (2021) ran survey experiments in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and find that equal treatment fairness beliefs affect preferences over progressive taxation. This is in line with a growing literature on the importance of fairness beliefs for distributional choices in the laboratory (Almås, Cappelen, & Tungodden, 2020;Cappelen, Moene, Sørensen, & Tungodden, 2013;Cherry & Shogren, 2008;Gee, Migueis, & Parsa, 2017;Lefgren, Sims, & Stoddard, 2016). In sum, fairness-based approaches suggest that the perception of the rich in a society is central for tax policy preferences.…”

Why Do (Some) Ordinary Americans Support Tax Cuts For the Rich? Evidence From A Randomized Survey Experiment

“…For instance, Scheve and Stasavage (2021) ran survey experiments in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and find that equal treatment fairness beliefs affect preferences over progressive taxation. This is in line with a growing literature on the importance of fairness beliefs for distributional choices in the laboratory (Almås, Cappelen, & Tungodden, 2020;Cappelen, Moene, Sørensen, & Tungodden, 2013;Cherry & Shogren, 2008;Gee, Migueis, & Parsa, 2017;Lefgren, Sims, & Stoddard, 2016). In sum, fairness-based approaches suggest that the perception of the rich in a society is central for tax policy preferences.…”

Equity Concerns are Narrowly Framed

“…8 Much of this work shows that individuals display different preferences in time and money domains. 9 Our finding that people are more inequity averse in time than in 6 Literature documents that subjects ignore prior choices and performance in some settings but that these factors influence fairness attitudes in other settings (Konow, 2000;Cappelen et al, 2007;Krawczyk, 2010;Cappelen et al, 2013;Mollerstrom, Reme and Sørensen, 2015;Akbaş, Ariely and Yuksel, 2016;Gee, Migueis and Parsa, 2017). In addition, a large, related literature examines how "earning the right" (or the entitlement effect) to be a dictator in the dictator game influences generosity (see Hoffman et al (1994) for early evidence and Engel (2011) for a review) while another paper shows a case where such an entitlement effect is absent (see the ultimatum game in Demiral and Mollerstrom (2018)).…”