Who Cares? Attitudes Towards Redistribution and Fiscal Austerity

Sarah Brown (), Alexandros Kontonikas, Alberto Montagnoli, Mirko Moro, Dafni Papoutsaki () and Willem Sas ()

No 9393, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We present new evidence showing that fiscal austerity strengthens support for redistribution, especially for the relatively well-off. Our theoretical model proposes two mechanisms to explain this heterogeneity in support for redistribution: ‘altruism’ and ‘appreciation’. We test our theoretical model’s predictions by matching attitudes reported in the British Social Attitudes Survey with local area-level spending cuts in England over the period 2010 to 2015. We exploit the spatial and temporal variation in spending cuts at the Local Authority level to compute a plausibly exogenous measure of the austerity shock. We find evidence for these two channels.

Keywords: austerity; fiscal consolidation; fiscal policy; redistribution; political attitudes; altruism; appreciation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D30 D64 E62 H20 H30 H60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9393.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9393

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().