EVAS

Ethical Views And Social Welfare: theory and evidence

A three year project to identify ethical views in society and to study their aggregation and implications for redistribution.

Participants

Paolo Piacquadio (University of St. Gallen). Co-PI. Responsible for the theory part.
Brian Jabarian (University of Chicago). Co-PI. Responsible for the experimental part.
Postdoc. Position to be filled!
PhD. Position to be filled!
Love Leijonklo (University of St. Gallen). Research Assistant.
Flore Richard (University of St. Gallen). Research Assistant.

Summary

The diversity of individuals’ ethical views is a central trait of modern societies. This project documents their richness, disentangles their role for determining social behavior, studies their coherence, analyzes how to formalize them and aggregate them in inclusive measures of social welfare, and explores the redistributive policies they support.Individuals differ with respect to their views of what makes the world better. 

Some people set a larger weight on reducing inequality, others prioritize efficiency gains. People often have different opinions about which distribution has more inequality. Moreover, they disagree about what constitutes an egalitarian treatment of people with different needs, opportunities, and preferences. These differences matter for their social behavior. The project adopts a combination of experiments and surveys to document the richness and diversity of individuals’ ethical views. 

Building on novel approaches, the project disentangles ethical views from socioeconomic status and beliefs in shaping individuals’ social preferences. As well-known, these are essential to explain individuals’ behavior. Here we explore their role in how to think about justice. In fact, ethical views are the backbone of any theory of justice. 

This project studies whether the views of individuals are coherent, identify a theory of justice, and can be represented by a social welfare function. The axiomatic approach, standard in welfare economics, allows axiomatizing the various ethical views and exploring their joint implications. With the goal of respecting individuals' ethical views, the project will uncover yet unexplored theories of justice by combining situation-specific concerns for equity with procedural views of fairness. 

Furthermore, the project addresses the aggregation of individuals’ heterogeneous ethical views in an inclusive measure of social welfare. The project also studies the relationship between individuals’ ethical views, inclusive measures of social welfare, and redistributive policies. It explores the theory and evidence around individuals’ support for redistributive policies. Crucially, it hopes to explain the puzzling gap between preferred policies and the policies that are optimal based on their ethical views. 

Finally, following the approach proposed by the PI in his ERC grant, it aims at identifying the redistribution policies that would be optimal for an inclusive measure of social welfare.This ambitious project bridges the gap between welfare economics, behavioral economics, and public economics. 

To tackle the above questions, it brings together a team of world-class senior economists and a group of talented early-career economists with complementary backgrounds. Their expertise will allow adopting different methodologies, ranging between axiomatic welfare economics to lab experiments and online surveys. Thanks to the project, the team collaboration will significantly push the research frontier with a pluralist, representative, and transparent framework to rethink social welfare functions, economic welfare analysis, and, indirectly, the derivation of economic policy recommendations. 

Objectives

Primary objectives:

• advance the scientific knowledge on how to set optimally taxes (i) on capital income and wealth, (ii) on houses; and (iii) for central and local governments.

• investigate theoretically and empirically the mapping between ethical views and taxation policies, providing an ethical menu for policymakers and an ethical identity to policies.

Secondary objectives:

• inform the public debate of the cost and benefits of alternative taxation policies, while leaving open the ultimate choice about which ethical views to endorse.

• construct new models to accommodate stylized facts and characterize optimal taxation policies.

• develop new theories of distributive justice, to accommodate fairness considerations about undeserved rents, housing needs,responsibility for past choices, and assessment uncertainty.

• contribute to the establishment of an international team of world-class economists focusing on the analysis, evaluation, and design of redistribution policies.

Financing

The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project Funding) with CHF 545,797  from 2024 to 2027 (Project N. 10001768).