Research 

Parents make many important choices that shape the opportunities and outcomes of their children. This paper studies parents' willingness to unlevel the playing field in favor of their child in a competition against another child. I report from a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment on 1840 parents and adolescent children, which is matched to high-quality administrative data. I provide a simple theoretical model to guide the interpretation of the results, where parents make a tradeoff between equal opportunities for all children and increasing their child's likelihood of succeeding. The study provides several novel findings. First, a significant share of the parents are willing to unlevel the playing field in favor of their own child. Second, I establish causally that parents' beliefs about the helping behavior of the other parent matter for their willingness to help their own child. Third, I provide evidence consistent with parents having self-serving beliefs. The findings show how parents may have different motivations for interfering in what would otherwise be a meritocratic competition between children; some may help to give their child an advantage; others to keep a level playing field. The findings are important for understanding how parental background may shape child development and for policy design.

How does the experience of success in combination with confidence affect meritocratic beliefs and preferences for redistribution? In a large-scale experiment, we manipulate both the level of confidence in own performance and the outcome of a competition to provide causal evidence. First, we document that increased confidence has a polarizing effect on meritocratic beliefs: Whereas we find no difference in beliefs between winners and losers in a low confidence treatment, increasing the level of confidence causes winners to believe that the competition is more likely to be determined by merit compared to losers. Furthermore, we find that confidence has no causal effect on preferences for redistribution. However, we do find that winning the competition significantly reduces the willingness to redistribute, regardless of confidence treatment. Our findings suggest that disagreements about the causes of inequality are most likely to occur among people who expect to succeed given a meritocratic process, but also that the disparities in beliefs have a limited causal impact on their preferences for the allocation of earnings.

In most countries, wealth inequality is much higher than income inequality, spurring debates about wealth taxation. However, it is unclear if voters are aware of these differences. In a large-scale survey experiment among a representative Dutch population (N=4,501), we study voters' perceptions of income and wealth distributions, and connect their views to administrative data about their own income and wealth. Despite a primer on the definition of income and wealth, respondents underestimate the difference between the top 10% share of income and wealth by a factor of 10. Moreover, they use information about the income distribution to make predictions about the wealth distribution and vice versa, even when information about both is provided, further demonstrating confusion about the two types of inequality. An information intervention about actual inequality levels and personal ranks in the income/wealth distribution has an impact on the perceived inequality and perceived fairness of inequality, but little effect on policy preferences. We discuss implications for political debates about inequality and wealth taxation.

Religious beliefs shape how people view the world and may be of great importance for understanding people’s attitudes to inequality. In this study, we investigate the extent to which people distinguish between luck and merit when making redistributive decisions. We utilize the Fairness Across the World data set, which provides individual data from 60 countries on both on fairness preferences and religiosity. It allows us to compare how religious and non-religious people across the world make real redistributive decisions in identical economic environments, where the source of inequality is manipulated.  We find that religious people are equally inequality accepting as non-religious people, but less sensitive to whether the source of inequality is luck or merit. These findings hold across religions and for different specifications of religious identity. Taken together, our findings suggest that religiosity is an important predictor of people's fairness views.

Lata collection planned for August 2024. 

What predicts individuals' contributions to public goods? How robust are cooperative preferences across time and different contexts? Using a representative sample of the Norwegian population, we elicit cooperative preferences in a one-shot, two-person public goods game, first with a contribution frame and one year later, with a maintenance frame. We examine factors that predict subjects' cooperative types using machine learning techniques. Our study offers two main findings. First, cooperative preferences seem to be unstable: despite two payoff-identical settings, only half of the subjects exhibit fully stable preferences across the two experiments. Second, the machine learning algorithm is unsuccessful in predicting individuals' cooperative type with the data at hand. Overall, our study suggests that contextual and unobservable characteristics are important in shaping behavior in public good games.