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Registration

Field Before After
Trial End Date August 31, 2025 September 30, 2025
Last Published April 03, 2025 01:08 PM June 27, 2025 06:11 AM
Intervention End Date April 05, 2025 July 15, 2025
Planned Number of Clusters 2500 respondents 5000 respondents
Planned Number of Observations 25000 respondent-question pairs. 5000 respondent-question pairs.
Intervention (Hidden) 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. 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.
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