This paper investigates how people differentiate between inequality caused by talent and inequality caused by luck in a large-scale study of the US population. We establish that people distinguish significantly between inequality due to luck and inequality due to talent, even when controlling...

This paper presents a new set of stylized facts about the global variation in universalism, leveraging hypothetical money allocation tasks deployed in representative samples of 64,000 people from 60 countries. Our data reveal large variation in universalism within and across countries, which...

This paper presents novel stylized facts about the global variation in universalism, leveraging nationally representative surveys across 60 countries (N=64,000). We find large variation in universalism within and across countries, which almost entirely reflects heterogeneity in people's moral...

We study paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the general population in the United States. Spectators decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, who is mistaken about the choice set, from making a choice that is not aligned with the...

We study paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the general population in the United States. Spectators decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, who is mistaken about the choice set, from making a choice that is not aligned with the...

We study paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the general population in the United States. Spectators decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, who is mistaken about the choice set, from making a choice that is not aligned with the...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of a change from centralized to decentralized political authority. The potential disadvantage with decentralization in our model is that local dominant groups with rather "extreme" preferences may win the vote and implement policies that harm the...

A core question in the contemporary debate on distributive justice is how the fair distribution of income is affected by differences in talent and effort. Important theories of distributive justice, such as strict egalitarianism, liberal egalitarianism and libertarianism, all give different...

Can lab experiments on student populations serve to identify the motivational forces present in society at large? We address this question by conducting, to our knowledge, the first study of social preferences that brings a nationally representative population into the lab, and we compare their...

The present paper seeks to explain the pattern of income redistribution in a globalised world of increased market income inequality and lower costs of factor mobility. In some countries, larger market income inequality has been met by an increased redistributive effort, thus keeping the...