Automation Anxiety, Fairness Perceptions, and Redistribution : Past Experiences Condition the Response to Future Job Loss

Do beliefs about fairness interact with past experiences of labor market shocks to condition redistributive preferences? We field a large-scale survey experiment to investigate the effect of informing individuals that growth in automation could disrupt labor markets in ways (possibly) viewed as ‘unfair’. We then exploit the COVID-19-induced labor market shock to test for an interaction between treatments and shock exposure. We find that beliefs interact with shock exposure to increase redistributive preferences and produce behavioral effects. Our findings suggest this may be motivated by respondents’ concerns about their vulnerability to future labor market shocks, which heighten fairness and prosocial concerns