In this hybrid research week keynote lecture on Wednesday 19th March 2025 at 14:00-15:30 CET, , a professor at the Department of Economics, ¡ª will present his research titled "Social Preferences Across the World".
Abstract:
This paper provides global evidence on the nature of inequality acceptance, based on a large-scale experimental study with more than 65,000 individuals across 60 countries. We show that, across the world, the source of inequality matters far more for inequality acceptance than the cost of redistribution. However, fairness views vary significantly across countries, largely reflecting disagreement over whether inequality caused by luck is fair. The meritocratic fairness view is most prevalent in the Western world, but substantial support for the libertarian and egalitarian fairness views exists in many countries. Focusing on beliefs, we further show that, globally, people believe luck plays a greater role than merit in shaping inequality, while disagreement about the cost of redistribution is more pronounced. Finally, we establish that both fairness views and beliefs about the source of inequality are key to understanding policy attitudes and cross-country variation in government redistribution, whereas efficiency considerations play a less important role.
The zoom link to join the seminar online can be found . This event is open to the public. All who are interested to this topic are very welcome to join the seminar. After the presentation there will be time for questions and discussion.
For any queries related to our ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ-MERIT Seminar Series, please contact Sneha Marydas and Cecilia Seri by sending an email to seminars@merit.unu.edu.
