We experimentally investigate whether people generally perceive inheritance as effort-induced or luck-induced. By randomly matched two strangers in a lab setting, we test whether the sources of opportunity handed down from the 'testator' subjects determines later redistributive decisions among...

This paper examines how perceived importance of family background affect distributional pref-erences using two large-scale survey experiments. In the first experiment, we randomly inform respondents about the relationship between parental income and economic success later in life, which renders...

An influential subset of the literature on distributional preferences studies how preferences condition on information about workers’ characteristics, such as their relative productivity. In this study we confirm that there are default effects when such conditional fair-ness preferences are...