Social Insurance and Income Redistribution in a Laboratory Experiment

Abstract

Why do some voters support income redistribution while others do not? Public assistance programs have two entangled effects on society: they equalize wealth, but they also cushion people against random catastrophes (like natural disasters). The authors conduct a laboratory experiment to determine how individuals’ responses to the environment are related to their self-expressed political ideology and their self-interest. The findings support the hypothesis that ideology is associated with a person’s willingness to use redistribution to reduce income inequality that is caused by luck, but it is not related to preferences for inequality that are not related to luck.

Aspirations of the Middle Class: Voting on Redistribution and Status Concerns

“…13 The most important coe¢ cient is 0 , which estimates the marginal impact of the net wage on e¤ort choices; the estimated coe¢ cient is equal to 1:002 and therefore perfectly in line with the theoretical prediction. Moreover, the…”

Las preferencias por la redistribución de los españoles a comienzos del siglo xxi

“…De otro lado, como valores que inciden en las preferencias individuales por la redistribución encontramos la historia y la cultura de la sociedad en la que vive el sujeto, así como la propia trayectoria vital del individuo (Lindbeck, 1997;Fehr y Schmidt, 1999;Boadway y Keen, 2000;Tirole y Bénabou, 2004;Alesina y Giuliano, 2011); el sentimiento de pertenencia a una comunidad (Luttmer, 2001;Lupu y Pontusson, 2011;Yamamura, 2012); la percepción individual sobre la existencia de justicia respecto de los resultados económicos cosechados por los sujetos (Bowles et al, 2001;Roemer, 2002;Hochschild, 2003;Alesina y Angeletos, 2005); la ideología (Shaw y Shapiro, 2005); el grado de movilidad social que el sujeto crea que existe (De Tocqueville, 1835;Hirschman, 1973;Alesina y La Ferrara, 2005;Bénabou y Ok, 2001); la religiosidad del individuo (Scheve y Stasavage, 2006); y su altruismo (Hochman y Rodgers, 1969;Thurow, 1971;Esarey et al, 2012;Costa i Font y Cowell, 2014). La evidencia empírica subraya que ser una persona religiosa, ideológicamente conservadora, carecer de sentimientos comunitarios, manifestar posiciones egoístas y la creencia de que la sociedad es móvil y meritocrática debilitan las preferencias por la redistribución de los sujetos.…”

Dependency Status and Demand for Social Insurance: Evidence from Experiments and Surveys

“…Unlike other experimental studies focusing on the redistributive aspects of social insurance (Barber et al, 2013;Esarey et al, 2011a), we take the policy proposal as exogenous.…”

“…The few studies that examine social insurance (Barber et al, 2013;Esarey et al, 2011a) approach the insurance-versus-redistribution issue in different ways. In this study we use our experimental design to explicitly avoid any concern with redistribution, both within and across "households," thereby isolating the income dependency and the insurance concerns that motivate this paper.…”