Did Southern elites' economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave-owning and two Northern states (1850-1880), we document a striking paradox: despite the massive wealth shock of emancipation, the...

The strong evidence in support of the Great Gatsby Curve (i.e. the negative cross-sectional relationship between intergenerational mobility and inequality) seems to be at odds with the fact that large increases in inequality in the US have not resulted in decreases in mobility. We tackle this...

Wealth is increasingly unequally distributed in many countries. This study examines public perceptions of wealth deservingness and preferences for taxing the wealth of the rich, focusing on how opinions vary based on the amount, use, and origin of wealth. Drawing on an original vignette...

This paper establishes three novel findings on fairness and redistribution by combining theory-driven experimental games with large-scale surveys in the U.S. and five European countries. First, individuals revealing egalitarian, libertarian, or meritocratic fairness preferences in experimental...

Existing evidence points to a positive correlation between specific regulations and income inequality at a country or regional level, but little is known about how overall regulatory burden affects inequality at the local labor market level. Our study fills this gap by measuring local exposure...

In a field experiment in China, we informed randomly selected workers that others received a higher wage for the same work. Compared to the uninformed but equally paid workers, the informed perceived their pay as less fair, but, surprisingly, increased their output without reducing quality....

In Deutschland kam und kommt es an Hochschulen auch zu pro-palästinensischen Protesten in Form von Camps und Institutsbesetzungen. Bei vielen der Protestaktionen wurden antisemitische Vorfälle registriert. Der vorliegende Bericht liefert nach einer ersten Datenerhebung im Dezember 2023 eine...

In Germany, pro-Palestine protests in the form of camps and institute occupations have occurred and continue to take place at universities. Antisemitic incidents have been reported at many of these protests. Following the initial data collection in December 2023, this report provides a new,...

Do minorities benefit from social networks? In this paper, we study this question using the historical example of China's first modern bureaucratic organization, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Drawing on newly digitized personnel records from 1876-1911, we first show that the Chinese...