Authors:

  • Alberto Alesina

Excerpt

Intergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution. Alberto Alesina, October 26, 2016, Paper, "Using newly collected cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect individuals’ preferences for redistribution. We start by documenting the anatomy of views on mobility, fairness, the government, and redistribution across five countries: France, Italy, Sweden, the U.S., and the U.K. We show that Americans are more optimistic than Europeans about intergenerational mobility, and are generally too optimistic relative to reality, especially about the chances of making it from the very bottom to the very top quintile." Link