Risks at Work: The Demand and Supply Sides of Government Redistribution

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both the genesis of popular preferences and the institutional incentives of governments to respond to these preferences. This paper attempts to do both, using a general theoretical framework and detailed data at both the individual and national levels. In a first step, we focus on how risk exposure and income are related to preferences for redistribution. To test our hypotheses, we extract detailed risk exposure measures from labor force surveys and marry them to cross-national survey data. In a second step, we turn our attention to the supply side of government redistribution. Terms of use: Documents in

Spend it like Beckham? Inequality and redistribution in the UK, 1983–2004

“…Other work (e.g. Fong, 2001;Alesina and La Ferrara, 2005) has shown how the attitude to redistribution is influenced by beliefs about whether success is the result of luck or hard work and Cusack et al (2006) find that the demand for redistribution is related to exposure to labour market risk. Unfortunately BSAS does not contain any question related to this.…”

Religion and Redistributive Voting in Western Europe

“…14 I include social class as a proxy for an individual's skill level and its associated labor market risks (Cusack et al 2005). 16 I focus on the most relevant contrast, which distinguishes class positions as a result of employment contracts (Goldthorpe 1995;Goldthorpe and McKnight 2006), distinguishing 'working class' individuals with wage contracts in jobs with low human capital specificity and easy monitoring of performance, from 'service class' individuals in salaried employment with high human capital specificity and difficult monitoring of performance.…”

Inequality, Labor Market Segmentation, and Preferences for Redistribution

“…Deindustrialization has reinforced this process by gradually segregating many low-skilled workers into insecure, often part-time or temporary, jobs (Gingrich and Ansell 2012;Kalleberg 2003;Wren 2013). Employment protection legislation benefiting mostly skilled workers in fulltime jobs probably reinforced this dualism (Rueda 2005, 2 See Cusack, Iversen, and Rehm (2006), Anderson and Pontusson (2007), Rehm et al (2012), and Margalit (2013). 2008). Immigration of workers without recognized skills in their host countries has added an ethnic-linguistic dimension to segmentation, creating more competition for low-end jobs while benefiting many skilled native workers who gain from lower prices on basic services like convenience stores or house cleaning.…”

“…We exclude some respondents who did not answer the question or said they did not know. risk exposure, we also include a measure of skill specificity (as defined in Cusack, Iversen, and Rehm 2006), capturing greater risk of long-term unemployment, or income loss, if workers have nonportable skills (Iversen and Soskice 2001). Finally, we control for actual current individual unemployment and the average unemployment rate in each country-year.…”