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The Altruistic Rich? Inequality And Other-Regarding Preferences For Redistribution, Matthew Dimick, David Rueda, Daniel Stegmueller

Journal Articles

What determines support among individuals for redistributive policies? Do individuals care about others when they assess the consequences of redistribution? This article proposes a model of other-regarding preferences for redistribution, which we term income-dependent altruism. Our model predicts that an individual’s preferred level of redistribution is decreasing in income, increasing in inequality, and, more importantly, that the inequality effect is increasing in income. Thus, even though the rich prefer less redistribution than the poor, the rich are more responsive, in a positive way, to changes in inequality than are the poor. We contrast these results with several other prominent …