Acceptance of Inequality Between Children: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from China and Norway

Alexander W Cappelen, Ranveig Falch, Zhongjing Huang and Bertil Tungodden

The Economic Journal, 2025, vol. 135, issue 667, 999-1020

Abstract: In a novel large-scale experiment, we study how adults in two societies, Shanghai (China) and Norway, make real distributive decisions involving children. We find that acceptance of inequality between children increases with the ages of the children, is affected by the source of inequality and the cost of redistribution, and is lower than acceptance of inequality between adults. We document a large cross-societal difference in inequality acceptance: adults in Shanghai implement twice as much inequality between children compared with adults in Norway. Finally, we show that the willingness to accept inequality between children is predictive of attitudes to child policies.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueae097 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:econjl:v:135:y:2025:i:667:p:999-1020.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().