Was Brexit Triggered by the Old and Unhappy? Or by Financial Feelings?

Eugenio Proto, Federica Liberini, Andrew Oswald and Michela Redoano

No 13439, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom voted in favour of ‘Brexit’. This paper is an attempt to understand why. It examines the micro-econometric predictors of anti-EU sentiment. The paper provides the first evidence for the idea that a key channel of influence was through a person’s feelings about his or her own financial situation. By contrast, the paper finds relatively little regression-equation evidence for the widely discussed idea that Brexit was favoured by the old and the unhappy. The analysis shows that UK citizens’ feelings about their incomes were a substantially better predictor of pro-Brexit views than their actual incomes. This seems an important message for economists, because the subject of economics has typically avoided the study of human feelings in favour of ‘objective’ data.

Date: 2019-01
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13439 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Was Brexit triggered by the old and unhappy? Or by financial feelings? (2019)
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:cpr:ceprdp:13439

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13439

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().