TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring Preferences for Income Equality and Income Mobility
AU - Lara E, Bernardo
AU - Shores, Kenneth A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
PY - 2024/11
Y1 - 2024/11
N2 - This paper quantifies preferences for income equality and mobility by generating statistics that are uncorrelated with beliefs and can be interpreted as marginal rates of substitution (MRS). All things being equal, U.S. residents are willing to reduce average income by $2,744 to reduce the 90/10 income inequality ratio one unit, and $1,228 to increase income mobility from the bottom quintile one percentage point. Democrats and Independents have similar preferences for both social variables, while Republicans have an MRS that is about two-thirds that of Democrats and Independents for both income inequality and mobility.
AB - This paper quantifies preferences for income equality and mobility by generating statistics that are uncorrelated with beliefs and can be interpreted as marginal rates of substitution (MRS). All things being equal, U.S. residents are willing to reduce average income by $2,744 to reduce the 90/10 income inequality ratio one unit, and $1,228 to increase income mobility from the bottom quintile one percentage point. Democrats and Independents have similar preferences for both social variables, while Republicans have an MRS that is about two-thirds that of Democrats and Independents for both income inequality and mobility.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105000012159
U2 - 10.1162/rest_a_01240
DO - 10.1162/rest_a_01240
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105000012159
SN - 0034-6535
VL - 106
SP - 1542
EP - 1557
JO - Review of Economics and Statistics
JF - Review of Economics and Statistics
IS - 6
ER -
