Capital vs. labour: The effect of income sources on attitudes toward the top 1 percent

Oscar Barrera-Rodríguez and Emmanuel Chávez

European Journal of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 88, issue C

Abstract: We conduct a randomized online survey to study how information on the share of top earners' income derived from capital and labour affects attitudes toward top earners. Our findings re-veal that: (i) At the baseline, respondents tend to overestimate the income of the top 1 percent, have no clear priors on their capital vs. labor shares, and want them to pay a higher income tax rate than the current one; (ii) quantitative information on top earners’ income sources leads people to have more unfavorable views toward the rich; (iii) individuals most responsive to our treatments vote for left-wing candidates and have egalitarian notions of justice.

Keywords: Top 1 percent; Income tax; Capital income shares; Top earners (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H20 H24 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268025000448
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:poleco:v:88:y:2025:i:c:s0176268025000448

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102684

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().