AEA RC T Registr y

The American Economic Association's registry for randomized controlled trials

The relationship between law and culture has long been the focus of scholarly attention by academic lawyers, economists and political scientists (see e Dari-Mattiacci and Guerriero, 2015, for a review and recent reassessment). Among prevalent cultural values, moral commitments take center stage and have been recently shown to vary greatly across regions (Awad et al.,2018). An emerging literature is starting to analyze the empirical foundations and implications of moral concerns (Sommers, 2020). While it is intuitive that there must be a connection between a society's prevalent set of moral norms and its laws, most previous studies only address part of the problem and, namely, how culture and morality affect the law. So far there is no rigorous empirical study as to how the law affects a society's moral attitudes. We aim at making a first step towards understanding how property rights---a crucially important set of legal rules---affect morality. We study how changing property rights affects individuals' survey responses to traditional moral dilemmas---such as killing more or fewer people, killing a man or a woman, killing the young or the old, and the like---which is turn can be matched to broader moral stands, such us the attitude towards gender, age, wealth, and social status.