The Class Content of Preferences Towards Anti-Inflation and Anti Unemployment Policies

This paper assesses class based preferences towards anti-inflationary and anti-unemployment policy. Using a consistent cross-country social survey, I find that the working class broadly defined, and those with lower occupational skill and status are more likely to prioritize combating unemployment rather than inflation. The result is robust to the inclusion of several plausible controls. The idea that the working class is less ‘relatively inflation averse’ is consistent with earlier predictions coming from large body of political economy research in the 1970s. The finding that inflation and unemployment aversion have a distinct class character has implications for current debates on the implications of macroeconomic policies such as inflation targeting..