Richer (and Holier) Than Thou? The Effect of Relative Income Improvements on Demand for Redistribution

Mounir Karadja, Johanna Mollerstrom and David Seim
Additional contact information
Johanna Mollerstrom: Humboldt University and German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin, and Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2017, vol. 99, issue 2, 201-212

Abstract: We use a tailor-made survey on a Swedish sample to investigate how individuals' relative income affects their demand for redistribution. We first document that a majority misperceive their position in the income distribution and believe that they are poorer, relative to others, than they actually are. We then inform a subsample about their true relative income and find that individuals who are richer than they initially thought demand less redistribution. This result is driven by individuals with prior right-of-center political preferences who view taxes as distortive and believe that effort, rather than luck, drives individual economic success.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (214)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00623 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Richer (and Holier) than Thou? The Effect of Relative Income Improvements on Demand for Redistribution (2014)
Working Paper: Richer (and Holier) Than Thou? The Effect of Relative Income Improvements on Demand for Redistribution (2014)
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:tpr:restat:v:99:y:2017:i:2:p:201-212

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().