Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:

Theory and Behavioral Evidence on the Role of Social Preferences in Inequality Aversion

Trial lecture:

Aud O at NHH, 10:15

Title of the thesis:

Essays on Inequality Acceptance and Meritocracy

Summary:

The thesis consists of three chapters, all of which concerns how we relate to inequality – both in outcomes and opportunities.

The first chapter is coauthored with Ingvild Almås, Alexander W. Cappelen, Erik Ø. Sørensen and Bertil Tungodden. They investigate whether religious people differ from non-religious people in their inequality acceptance and beliefs about the sources of economic inequality.

In the study, they utilize the global Fairness Across the World data set. Their sample consists of about 65,000 people from 60 different countries, who have all made consequential redistributive decisions under identical economic environments. Comparing religious to non-religious people, they find the religious, on average, to be less sensitive to the source of inequality; treating inequalities due to luck and merit more alike. The religious people are, compared to the non-religious, more tolerant to inequalities caused by luck and less tolerant when they reflect differences in merit.

The findings are consistent with the idea that the religious are more likely to find luck to be an acceptable source of inequality as they are more inclined to interpret it as meaningful – reflecting God's will. Taken together, the findings suggest that religiosity is strongly related to people's inequality acceptance. However, to fully understand how religion shapes inequality acceptance, more work is needed.

In the second chapter, Sund studies whether parents are willing to forego the principle of equal opportunities for all children to benefit their own child in what would otherwise be a meritocratic competition. To address the question she arranged a mathematics competition together with 24 Norwegian secondary schools. Initially, students have equal opportunities to succeed; however, prior to the competition, Sund gave parents the opportunity to help their child by making their child's math questions easier. Randomly assigning parents to one out of two different treatment conditions, the candidate identifies the causal effect that the possibility of another parent unleveling the playing field has on parents' willingness to help their child.

Oda Sund´s findings show that parents may undermine originally meritocratic processes, either deliberately by giving their child an advantage at the cost of another child's opportunity to succeed, or without intention - believing there is a chance of another parent unleveling the playing field.

The last chapter is coauthored with Kajsa Hansson. In a large-scale online experiment, Sund and Hansson study the causal impact of confidence in combination with the experience of failure and success on the beliefs about the source of inequality and preferences for redistribution.

The study has two main findings. First, they document that increased confidence has a polarizing effect on meritocratic beliefs: Whereas they find no effect of winning in the condition where people on average expect to lose in a meritocratic competition, increasing the level of confidence causes winners to believe that the competition is more likely to be determined by merit compared to losers.

Second, Sund and Hansson find that the experience of winning significantly decreases the willingness to redistribute, independent of confidence treatment. In conclusion, their findings suggest that whereas confidence is important for understanding the formation of meritocratic beliefs, only the experience of failure and success translates to preferences for redistribution.

Defense:

Aud O at NHH, 12:15

Members of the evaluation committee:

Associate Professor Samuel Hirshman (leader of the committee), Department of Economics and FAIR 

Professor Pia Pinger, University of Cologne

Professor Sigrid Suetens, Universitetet i Tilburg

Supervisors:

Professor Bertil Tungodden (main supervisor), Department of Economics and FAIR 

Professor Mathias Sutter, Director, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.



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