 Does redistribution affect cooperation and trust?Eva Ranehill, Roberto A. Weber and Keyu Wu Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, vol. 226, issue C Abstract: We experimentally investigate the degree to which redistribution, the act of taking money from some individuals and giving it to others, affects social capital in groups. We measure social capital as the degree to which group members exhibit cooperativeness, trust and trustworthiness toward one another. Our experiment involves several rounds of real-effort production, in which we vary the degree to which individual income is redistributed at the end of each round according to either progressive or regressive redistributive policies. We find no statistically significant impacts of such experience with redistribution on any of our primary measures of social capital. Exploratory work considering heterogeneous impacts by relative income positions and using alternative measures of social capital also yields no reliable impacts. We observe some impacts of redistribution on productivity. Keywords: Social capital; Redistribution; Trust; Cooperation; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:226:y:2024:i:c:s0167268124003007 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106694 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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