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Fairness and family background

Almås, Ingvild; Cappelen, Alexander W.; Salvanes, Kjell G.; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil
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http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2357464
Issue date
2015-10
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  • Discussion papers (SAM) [553]
Abstract
Fairness preferences fundamentally affect individual behavior and play an

important role in shaping social and political institutions. However, people differ

both with respect to what they view as fair and with respect to how much

weight they attach to fairness considerations. In this paper, we study the role of

family background in explaining these heterogeneities in fairness preferences. In

particular, we examine how socioeconomic background relates to fairness views

and to how people make trade-offs between fairness and self-interest. To study

this we conducted an economic experiment with a representative sample of 14-15

year-olds and matched the experimental data to administrative data on parental

income and education. The participants made two distributive choices in the

experiment. The first choice was to distribute money between themselves and

another participant in a situation where there was no difference in merit. The

second choice was to distribute money between two other participants with unequal

merits. Our main finding is that there is a systematic difference in fairness

view between children from low socioceconomic status (SES) families and the

rest of the participants; more than 50 percent of the participants from low SES

families are egalitarians, whereas only about 20 percent in the rest of the sample

hold this fairness view. In contrast, we find no significant difference in the weight

attached to fairness between children from different socioeconomic groups.
Publisher
SAM
Series
Discussion paper;25/15

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