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Eva Ranehill. Photo.

Eva Ranehill

Professor

Eva Ranehill. Photo.

Does redistribution affect cooperation and trust?

Author

  • Eva Ranehill
  • Roberto A. Weber
  • Keyu Wu

Summary, in English

We experimentally investigate the degree to which redistribution, the act of taking money from some individuals and giving it to others, affects social capital in groups. We measure social capital as the degree to which group members exhibit cooperativeness, trust and trustworthiness toward one another. Our experiment involves several rounds of real-effort production, in which we vary the degree to which individual income is redistributed at the end of each round according to either progressive or regressive redistributive policies. We find no statistically significant impacts of such experience with redistribution on any of our primary measures of social capital. Exploratory work considering heterogeneous impacts by relative income positions and using alternative measures of social capital also yields no reliable impacts. We observe some impacts of redistribution on productivity.

Department/s

  • Department of Economics

Publishing year

2024-10-01

Language

English

Publication/Series

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Volume

226

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Elsevier

Topic

  • Economics and Business

Keywords

  • Social capital; Redistribution; Trust; Cooperation; Experiment

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0167-2681