This paper explores the factors that influence redistributive preferences in the

context of sustained economic expansion, focusing on luck and growth. Using an

online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample from China, we

find that priming getting rich via relatively less meritocratic, yet representative ways

under market transition in post-reform China reduces redistributive support, specifically for policies that aim to take from the rich and the belief in the government’s duty to redistribute, indicating the presence of a set of fairness views in China that could deviate from meritocratic ideals. Heterogeneous treatment effects analyses reveal that such non-meritocratic fairness views are a general phenomenon and self-interest in the form of subjective economic pressure only serves as a secondary concern. While people feel that the rich are more deserving and demand less redistribution after being primed with stories of getting rich via transition premium regardless of subjective economic pressure, only those under less economic pressure exhibit decreased support for policies that aim to help the poor. Priming China’s growth story does not result in statistically significant changes in redistributive support. Additionally, we rule out the influence of three relevant confounders: low tax salience, preference falsification under authoritarianism, and misperceptions about relative income positions and intergenerational occupational mobility. We argue that such potentially non-meritocratic fairness views are particularly salient in societies that break away from a centrally-planned economic system in the past, and transition towards a high-growth market economy, where economic fortunes are abundant and random.

Recent experimental evidence contends 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, by varying the initial split of payoffs between two real-life workers to redistribute from. We show that, compared to French respondents, Chinese respondents consistently and significantly choose more non-redistribution across both highly unequal and relatively equal status quo scenarios. Additionally, we also find that Chinese respondents do differentiate between merit- and luck-based inequalities, and do not redistribute less than the French, excluding the individuals who engage in non-redistribution choices. Chinese respondents are also as reactive as the French towards scenarios with noisy signals of merit, such as inequalities of opportunities. Ultimately, we contend that the reluctance to make an active choice is indicative of 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 Chinese individuals' reluctance to make a choice is particularly pronounced among those from families of working-class and farming backgrounds, while it is absent among individuals whose families have closer ties to the private sector.

This study presents “Distributional National Accounts (DINA)" for South Korea. We combine household survey micro data, tax data, and national accounts to construct annual pretax income inequality series which is coherent with macro aggregates. We show the distribution of pretax national income over the period from 1933 to 2020, with detailed breakdown by age, gender, and income composition in the years from 1996 to 2020. This series allows for a much richer analysis of the long-run income inequality trend in South Korea than previous work based on fiscal tabulation, which only includes top income shares and misses an increasing component of tax-exempted capital income in recent years. Our new series suggests that after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, income inequality has worsened due to the rise of tax-exempted capital income concentration at the top. Additionally, South Korea is characterized with relatively higher gender inequality and lower old-age income shares compared to the United States and France. Compared to other East Asian countries, South Korea exhibits relatively lower levels of income inequality, mostly due to the fact that its national income growth was more equally distributed in the early stages of economic take-off in the 1980s, even though income inequality has worsened over the last three decades. Rather strikingly, despite similar economic backgrounds and development trajectories, there is a huge gap in pretax national income inequality between Taiwan and South Korea. This gap stems mostly from the fact that the distribution of capital income in Taiwan has been much more unequal than that in Korea. 

Colonial states were described either as overwhelming Leviathans or as administration on the cheap. We study enforcement and compliance for two pillars of colonial rule in French West Africa: military conscription and head tax collection, using novel data at the district level from 1919 to 1949. Military recruitment targets were met without difficulty by drawing more conscripts among the pool of fit young men, despite low health conditions and frequent avoidance from the indigenous population. Head tax compliance was also strikingly high, with the colonial authorities collecting taxes from more than 80\% of the eligible population on average. In contrast to conscription targets which were set based on local population densities, tax rates were adjusted according to perceived economic affluence across colonial districts. Taxation, however, often led to collective protests, in particular during the Great Depression when the increase in head tax rates was significantly correlated with the onset of tax-related conflicts. However, districts hit by export price collapses or by droughts were not granted specific tax rebates. Colonial states were quite effective in enforcing their rule and not entirely blind to local socio-economic conditions, yet were not able, if even willing, to fine-tune their policies. 

In this paper, we study the coercive military forced labor regime instituted by the French colonial authorities in colonial Mali between 1927 and 1950. Due to endemic labor scarcity, the colonial authorities resorted to activating military reservists as forced laborers for public infrastructure construction. This acted as an in-kind tax on the most productive workforce, as only the 20% healthiest individuals were ultimately recruited by the conscription system. By digitizing more than 180,000 hand-written individual soldier files as well as colonial-time district conscription tables, we find that historically speaking, the activation of military forced labor was strongly correlated with local population density and specific demands of different public infrastructure projects. We further document that the severe working conditions in this coercive labor system may have propelled the conscripts to join the regular army as volunteers, whose total numbers were capped. Over the long run, we also find that Malian localities that were historically more exposed to military forced labor (as opposed to regular army recruits) continue to display lower development outcomes until this day. This effect also seems to be stronger in localities with a higher share of reservists activated as forced workers, suggesting that it is not only driven by a positive shock resulting from enrollment in the army. Interestingly, the levels of inequality in these localities are also comparatively reduced. Furthermore, such effects on inequality only emerged in more recent years, which points to dynamics on long-term persistence of forced labor regimes. These results highlight the importance of understanding the particular historical set-up of extractive colonial institutions, and how this in turn would affect the dynamics of their enduring legacies on development outcomes.

China’s rapid economic development and its central role as a driver of globalization have resulted in expanding economic ties with the European Union (EU) over the past few decades. However in the most recent years, given geo-political tensions there's also a lot of concerns within the EU over whether investment ties should be further strengthened with China. In this project, we plan to focus on one important dimension of such mutual economic ties: namely Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) between China and Germany, the latter of which is one of China's biggest investment partners within the EU. Specifically, we propose to conduct a randomized information-provision survey experiment, in which we will survey the German public’s opinions towards inward Chinese Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in Germany, where we will investigate first of all, whether there are major misperceptions from the German public when it comes to the actual figures and status quo with regards to Chinese FDIs inside Germany. And secondly, we will study the contrasting causal effects of negative (and positive) Chinese FDI narratives versus Chinese FDI facts on the formation of preferences towards Chinese investments.