Meritocracies aspire to reward effort and hard work but promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances they were born into. The choice to work hard is, however, often shaped by circumstances. This study investigates whether people's merit judgments are sensitive to this endogeneity of...

Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others...

This paper focuses on two equity dimensions of climate policy, intra- and intergenerational equity, and analyzes the implications of equity preferences on climate policy, and on the production and consumption patterns in rich and poor countries. We develop a dynamic two-region model, in which...

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...

The article is concerned with understanding the impact of social preferences and wealth inequality on aggregate economic outcomes. We investigate how different manifestations of other-regarding preferences affect incentive contracts at the microeconomic level and how these in turn translate into...

Inequity plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in many dimensions.We revisit the concept of inequity, whether across states of world (uncertainty), across individuals (inequality) and across generations (intergenerational equity), using a common framework generalizing the...

We design a novel experiment to identify aversion to pure (univariate) health inequality separately from aversion to income-related and income-caused health inequality. Participants allocate resources to determine health of individuals. Identification comes from random variation in resource...

There is no consensus on how to measure social welfare and inequality when households have different needs. As we show, a dilemma emerges between holding households responsible for their needs or compensating them. This dilemma is of first-order importance for social welfare, but generally plays...

The empirical evidence on the existence of social preferences—or lack thereof—is predominantly based on student samples. Yet, knowledge about whether these findings can be extended to the general population is still scarce. In this paper, we compare the distribution of social preferences in...