This paper proposes two related measures of educational inequality: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores. Its selection is informed by consideration of two measurement issues that have...

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in 20th-century India. Creating a new dataset of district level political outcomes between 1921 and 1957, we find that the partial franchise extension of 1935 resulted in...

This is the first study to examine the effect of experiencing a widespread, deadly epidemic on voting behavior. Using data on elections to the U.S House of Representatives and leveraging cross-district variation in HIV/AIDS mortality during the period 1983-1987, we document the effects of the...

Three decades ago, Sweden extended municipal and county voting privileges to non-citizen residents arguing that it would increase political influence, interest and self-esteem among foreign citizens. Three decades later, electoral participation on the part of immigrants is perceived as being...

This paper estimates the effect of enrollment in a large scale anti-poverty program in Colombia, Familias en Acción (FA), on intent to vote, turnout and electoral choice. For identification we use discontinuities in program eligibility and variation in program enrollment across voting booths....

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

This study examines the relationship between financial literacy and political orientation in Great Britain. Using novel data from the British Election Survey in 2014, we employ two distinct measures of political orientation, capturing individual self-assessment on a left-right axis and party...

Using new data from a three-wave panel survey administered in Germany between May 2020 and May 2021, this paper studies the impact of a negative shock affecting every strata of the population, such as the development of COVID-19, on preferences for redistribution. Exploiting the plausibly...

We compare inequality aversion in individuals and teams by means of both within- and between-subject experimental designs, and we investigate how teams aggregate individual preferences. We find that team decisions reveal less inequality aversion than individual initial proposals in team...

We develop a new experiment to study the emergence of welfare-reducing bilateral alliances within larger groups, and the effectiveness of institutional interventions to curtail this reciprocal alliance behaviour. In each of the 25 rounds of our experiments, a player (the 'allocator') nominates...