Research
Research
Meritocracy and Birthrights
I study fairness views regarding inequalities that arise from birthrights, entitlements inherited from being born into a privileged group via the ’birth lottery.’ In Western liberal democracies, meritocracy is a powerful and widely supported normative fairness ideal, according to which individuals should be rewarded based on individual merit but not based on factors beyond their control. Yet, even in such societies, birthrights are widespread, raising the question of whether people perceive birthrights as a genuine source of entitlement or as a flaw within the system, undermining fairness. I conduct controlled online experiments using general samples of the US population and demonstrate that recognizing birthrights as a legitimate source of entitlement is a feature of people’s redistributive preferences. Finally, I re-calibrate a model of optimal inheritance taxation by incorporating these fairness principles, demonstrating that this adjustment significantly reduces the optimal tax rates. The central contribution of this paper is to provide a basis for the acceptance and persistence of birthrights — even in meritocratic societies.
A central driver of income inequality are market forces beyond individual control, a phenomenon we refer to as market luck. In meritocratic societies, this raises the question of whether individuals perceive such inequalities as fair. To address this question, we conduct an experiment in the US where inequality between workers emerges due to random matching with buyers who require specific skills, creating inequality driven by market luck. Our findings indicate that individuals are more accepting of inequalities resulting from market luck than those caused by brute luck, even though both are beyond workers’ control and unrelated to their effort. Large-scale experiments in France and China confirm directionally consistent results across all three countries, though with varying magnitudes of treatment effects, suggesting that redistributive preferences are sensitive to cultural differences and exposure to market institutions. We further validate our findings in additional survey experiments designed around real-life situations, and we show that behavior in the experiments predicts support for real-world policies. Our results provide a novel explanation for the muted demand for redistribution amid rising inequality.
Work in Progress
Parental Preferences and Intergenerational Inequality Transmission (with Oda Sund)
We study parents’ competitive behaviour when they act on behalf of their children and have the possibility to generate advantages for them. Although there is broad support for equality of opportunity in Western societies, we observe relatively low degrees of social mobility. One reason is that parents make significant private investments to increase their children’s educational or professional opportunities. However, given the considerable disparities in parents' economic resources, these investments make it challenging to uphold equality of opportunity simultaneously. We want to shed light on these counteracting forces.
Economic factors and support for medical aid in dying (with Nicola Lacetera, Florian H. Schneider, and Roberto A. Weber)