Fair Institutions

Justin Valasek, Weijia Wang and Justin Mattias Valasek

No 11804, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The experimental literature on preferences for redistribution has established that individual perceptions of what earning distributions are fair depend greatly on context. In this paper, we study an important and novel dimension of context: whether the choice to redistribute occurs before workers work and accrue earnings, or after. Contrary to the predictions of our theoretical framework, we find no evidence that spectators are less likely to equalize earnings ex ante than to equalize earnings ex post. Interestingly, our study also suggests that, relative to American subjects, Scandinavian subjects are more likely to equalize ex post earnings, but we find no evidence that Scandinavian and American subjects make different choices ex ante. A follow-up analysis suggests that the latter result is largely due to Scandinavian and American subjects having similar preferences over ex ante redistribution when equalizing earnings comes at a cost to efficiency. Overall, our results suggest that context-dependent preferences for redistribution are sensitive to the relative timing of the redistribution choice.

Keywords: inequality; fairness; institutions; experiment. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wpNr11804.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:_11804

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 ().