Increasing inequality is commonly associated with social unrest and conflict between social classes. This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment to study the implications of rising inequality on the tendency to burn others' income. The experiment considers an environment where...

Several studies have demonstrated that income inequality has risen since the 1960s. Other studies have found that people underestimate the extent of the inequality. Reasons for these mis-perceptions include over-reliance on one's own local environment and ideologically-motivated reasoning. We...

Exemptions from costly policy measures are frequently applied to alleviate financial burdens to specific market participants. Using a stated-choice experiment with around 6,000 German household heads, we test how exemptions for lowincome households and energy-intensive companies influence the...

This paper studies whether limited information about inequality accounts for the (optimistic) beliefs and the (anti-tax) preferences of American voters. Unlike standard surveys, this experiment examines preferences for taxation while controlling for perceived economic opportunity, beliefs about...

A defining feature of meritocratic societies is that resource distributions reflect individual effort levels. However, this introduces a dilemma in a world where parents care for their children. If one pair of parents works harder than a second pair of parents, the first pair has merited the...