Support for a larger government has remained stable despite the growing inequality over the last 40 years in the US, which standard economic models of government size fail to predict. In this paper, we highlight the governmental role of public goods provision as a key political determinant of...

Overconfident people who do not earn what they think they can may attribute this negative gap to the unfairness of the economy and thereby favor reducing income inequality when they realize their income-ability gap. We conducted an online survey experiment in the US in which we assigned the...

This study uncovers a novel effect of public goods on inequality through public opinions. We hypothesize that people are more likely to support a tax increase after realizing the benefit from public goods, helping to reduce inequality by expanding government size. We conducted an online survey...

I document that being bullied at school is strongly associated with the support for redistribution in adulthood. Using unique Japanese survey data, I estimate that being bullied at school increases the support for redistribution in adulthood by around 5-7 percentage points. I carefully examine...

To explore the propagation of undesirable policies in a form of populist extremism, we construct a social learning model featuring agency problems. Politicians in different countries sequentially implement a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by...