Research

China has experienced a remarkable rise in living standards over four decades of economic reforms, alongside a tremendous increase in inequalities. In this context, do Chinese people support redistribution of wealth gained through reform windfalls? To answer this question, we conducted an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample from China (N = 2,000). The treatment group was shown examples of wealth acquired through typical reform-era pathways requiring minimal ability or effort. This exposure led to a 0.1 standard deviation decrease in their support for redistribution. We propose a “reform windfall as redistribution” mechanism to explain this reduction: the treated group perceives the reform era as inherently redistributive, providing opportunities to escape systemic inequalities tied to the political system, thereby reducing the perceived need for formal redistribution. This decline in support is not driven by changes in fairness perceptions, as respondents do not attribute the wealth acquisition scenarios to ability or effort, nor do they view them as distinctly fair or unfair. Furthermore, we find limited evidence of heterogeneity, with one exception: individuals reporting higher economic pressure show an even greater reduction in redistributive support when exposed to the treatment. We hypothesize that this occurs because unmet expectations for upward mobility exacerbate their reactions to the treatment scenarios.

The prevalence of severe flooding events has led to the need for developing additional stormwater infrastructure that can mitigate runoff into traditional storm drains while offering aesthetic alternatives to concrete and metal (“gray”) drainage systems. We explore how Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) impacts house prices, how it can be financed, and whether the approaches proposed and those currently used are consistent with fair and equitable practices. We develop an innovative identification strategy that uses difference-in-differences regression methods. We rely on a comprehensive data set of housing sales prices and assessed values in the City of Philadelphia, PA, together with a detailed set of geographic information systems data on the locations and installation dates of GSI throughout the city. With this approach, we first estimate that the causal impacts of GSI on single-family residential sales prices per square foot of living area are in the range of 10%, on average. This range of estimates is consistent across a broad range of alternative robustness checks. We also compare two alternative stormwater financing mechanisms with the current Philadelphia Water Department user fee, which is a flat charge based on the average residential impervious area of all homes in the city. Specifically, for a fee structure dependent on a traditional property tax, as well as separately a fee based on the amount of impervious area on each property, we compare the share of property value paid for the stormwater charge against the overall property value to determine whether the alternative financing mechanism would be neutral. Indeed, we find that both of these alternative approaches are also regressive. The impervious area charge is more regressive than the property tax approach but less regressive than the flat fee because more expensive homes tend to have less impervious areas. These findings may motivate offering greater incentives or subsidies for owners of lower-valued homes to purchase and install GSI.

Recent experimental evidence suggests that meritocratic ideals are mainly a Western phenomenon. Intriguingly, the Chinese public does not appear to differentiate between merit- and luck-based inequalities, despite China’s historical emphasis on meritocratic institutions. We propose that this phenomenon could be due to the Chinese public’s greater reluctance to make an active choice in real-stake redistribution decisions. We run an incentivized redistribution experiment with elite university students in China and France where we vary the initial split of payoffs between two real-life workers to redistribute from. We show that Chinese respondents consistently and significantly choose more non-redistribution across different status quo scenarios. Additionally, if we exclude the individuals who engage in non-redistribution choices, Chinese respondents do differentiate between merit- and luck-based inequalities and do not redistribute less than the French. Chinese respondents are as reactive as the French towards scenarios with noisy signals of merit, such as inequalities of opportunities. We argue that the reluctance to make an active choice signals diminished political agency to act upon redistribution decisions with real-life stakes, rather than apathy, inattention, having benefited from the status quo in Chinese society, or libertarian preferences among the Chinese. Notably, our findings show that the reluctance to make a choice is particularly pronounced among respondents of working-class or farming backgrounds, while it is absent among individuals whose families have closer ties to the private sector.

We document a widespread decline in the share of donors to charities in Western countries over the past decade, and show that this can be in part explained by the growing electoral importance of the far right, using several novel datasets and empirical strategies. First, we conduct a large-scale survey in France in 2022 and show that far-right voters are significantly less likely to report a charitable donation than the rest of the population. Second, we provide similar evidence using administrative tax data between 2013 and 2019 combined with electoral results for the universe of French municipalities, relaxing social desirability bias concerns. Using unique geo-localized charity-level records between 2012 and 2024, we next find that, while the negative relationship between far-right voting and charitable giving is stronger for charities with a global reach than for more local ones, far-right voters do not compensate less universalistic preferences by more local donations; they simply give less overall. Exploiting novel administrative tax data from the public funding of NPOs in Italy, we show that the lower altruistic preferences of far-right voters do not result from the lack of supply of communal charities. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence of a negative causal impact of far-right voting on the propensity to give, driven by the increasing salience of far-right criticism of the charitable sector.

Past studies on demand for redistribution often assume a meritocratic norm in redistributive preferences, where people favor increased wealth redistribution in societies attributing income disparities to luck rather than effort. An analysis of international survey data highlights that these preferences are mainly if not only, found in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries, especially Anglo-Saxon and Protestant European nations. Within WEIRD countries, there is a strong negative correlation between the demand for redistribution and the belief that effort determines income inequality. Surprisingly, many non-WEIRD countries exhibit the opposite trend, where a higher belief in the role of effort leads to greater demands for redistribution. This phenomenon cannot be explained completely by trust in government, religiosity, or kinship intensity. Remarkably, not all uncontrollable sources of income inequality are seen as equally unfair. While disparities tied to family wealth and political privilege universally trigger calls for redistribution, gender, racial, and religious hierarchies are often considered fair and don’t warrant redistribution in non-WEIRD countries.

Climate change has necessitated innovative approaches to financing storm water mitigation in coastal communities throughout the world. We study how adding bioswales near residential properties in New Haven, CT would impact property values. New Haven has extensively implemented bioswales and maintains an excellent geospatial dataset on their locations and dates of installation. We show that there is approximately an 8.8 percent increase in residential property prices due to the presence of nearby bioswales. We also explain that the incremental property value increases from additional bioswale proximity can be used in a reassessment leading to a value capture type of approach for financing the additional bioswales, with the potential for raising $1.38 million if the full increase in property values due to adding additional bioswales were to be captured. Finally, we use International Association of Assessing Officers (2013) standards to determine that the proposed reassessment would be non-regressive. Our approach could be useful to planners, engineers, and assessors in New Haven and other cities considering green stormwater infrastructure as one way to combat climate change.