Redistribution and the welfare state have been linked by academic discourse to narratives that portray specific societal groups as 'deserving' or 'undeserving'. The present analysis contributes to this scholarship in a twofold manner. First, it provides a holistic view on the beneficiaries and...

Using cross-country survey data and a survey experiment, I examine the effects of experienced social mobility on support for redistribution. In line with the self-serving bias, those with negative mobility experiences 'blame the system' and extrapolate from their experience onto society, which...

Technological change has fundamentally transformed the US labour market in recent decades, with high-earning jobs becoming increasingly focused on nonroutine, complex tasks. We provide a first experimental test of whether fairness perceptions and preferences for redistribution differ when top...

We suggest that stabilizing the baseline income can make low-wage workers more tolerant towards high income earners. We present evidence of this attitude in the UK by exploiting the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW), which institutionally sets a baseline pay reducing the risk of...

Thirty years after the "Washington Consensus", is there a new policy consensus that addresses the problem of inequality? This paper argues that there is widespread acceptance that multiple, interrelated and mutually reinforcing inequalities exist – in income, wealth, education, health, power,...

Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...

People with higher-incomes tend to support less redistribution than lower-income people. This has been attributed not only to self-interest, but also to psychological mechanisms including differing beliefs about the hard work or luck underlying inequality, differing fairness views, and differing...

What matters for individuals' preferences for redistribution? In this paper we show that consequentialist beliefs about inequality — beliefs about how economic inequality changes the crime rate or the quality of democratic institutions, for example — have a large causal impact on...

Many of the world's LDCs are plagued by recurring conflict. Conflict impedes sustainable development through various channels, creating conditions conducive to further conflict. Conflict has redistributive impacts, particularly when it erupts in resource-rich countries. Between 2002 and 2011,...