Normative Redistribution Preferences

Exogenous treatment variation in people's income and transfer levels. Further details are in the Pre-Analysis Plan.

Survey takers will answer 10 questions about income transfers to US families. Choice sets differ in terms of the income of the families and cost of transfer, both of which will be randomized across questions and across recipients.

This means that people are exogenously exposed to varying levels of income and transfer. This random treatment variation allows us to estimate people's elasticity redistributive preferences with respect to these two variables.

We are attaching the full survey as a document to this pre-registration.






Update June 27 2025: We have now collected the data and are planning to run a second wave that tests whether redistributive preferences and beliefs about efficiency effects of taxes are malleable by information treatments. Specifically, our Wave 2 Survey will look just like Wave 1 but randomize the following information treatments:

1. Information about the average Elasticity of Taxable Income (ETI) that we found in our Meta Analysis.
2. Information about one selected ETI that is particularly high. We do not state that this ETI is high relative to the literature but we simply tell subjects that one of the estimates we found is equal to this value.
3. Information about the ETI of a worker earning $40,000 annually versus the ETI of a worker earning $100,000.
4. Information about the redistributive preferences that of other American households that we surveyed in Wave 1.

Subjects will be randomized into treatments 1-3 and a control group that receives no information on the ETI. Then we cross-randomize treatment 4 that provides information about redistributive preferences. Our interventions are designed to study how beliefs about i) the ETI and ii) other people's redistributive preferences shape our estimates of social marginal welfare weights.

2025-04-03

2025-07-15

The primary outcome of the experiment is an estimated distribution of redistribution preferences. See PAP for further details.

The distribution of redistribution preferences will be estimated via the maximum likelihood estimator implied by a structural model of redistribution preferences. We assume that survey-takers have generalized marginal social welfare weights that they use to evaluate the desirability of different transfers, and make choices to maximize the size of the transfer, multiplied by their welfare weight. We allow for some cognitive noise in making decisions. Further details are in the PAP.

- Participants' subjective beliefs about tax elasticities.
- Interactions of redistributive preferences with the vector of observables elicited in the survey. See attached survey for elicited observables.
- Narratives about why people make the transfer choices they have made in the survey. This is an open-end question where we will classify narratives into categories based on LLM and manual work by research assistants.

The survey will be distributed to a representative sample of US adults. Each survey respondent will take the same survey, but the transfer choice sets will be randomized.

This survey experiment is part of a large project that aims to understand the sources of disagreement about labor income tax policy. Specifically, the question we aim to ask is the following: are disagreements about policy more a result of scientific disagreements about the likely effects of policy or more due to normative differences in the intensity of the redistributive motive across voters? To understand the scope of scientific disagreements, we have conducted a meta-analysis of the existing literature on using nonlinearities in the income tax schedule to identify elasticities of taxable income. The present experiment will speak to the normative component.

The goal of this survey experiment is to elicit the preferences for redistribution within the US population. The survey will present respondents with a number of government transfers varying by recipient characteristics as well as the cost of the transfer. Responses to these questions will help identify individual-specific redistribution preferences.

Choices have real consequences in expectation: At the end of this study, we will randomly select two families from the U.S. population who are also part of the Prolific sample but are not participants in this survey. These families will be matched to income levels similar to those presented in the choice sets of the survey. One of these families will receive the exact transfer amount chosen by a participant in this study, while the other family will receive nothing.

Randomization done when the survey loads, by a computer.

Randomization is at the respondent-question level.

No

5000 respondents

5000 respondent-question pairs.

N/A. Randomization is done on a relatively continuous scale, since we randomize income and transfers.

Simulation evidence suggests the sample size suffices to get a tight estimate of redistribution preferences. See further details in the PAP attached.

PAP

Survey