@misc{10481/64312,
year = {2020},
month = {7},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10481/64312},
abstract = {According to Alesina and Angeletos (2005), societies are less redistributive but more efficient
when the median voter believes that effort and talent are much more important than luck in
determining income. We test these results through a lab experiment in which participants vote
over the tax rate and their pre-tax income is determined according to their performance in a realeffort
task with leisure time. Subjects receive either a high or a low wage and this condition is
either obtained through their talent in a tournament or randomly assigned. We compare subjects'
decisions in these two different scenarios, taking into consideration different levels of wage
inequality. In our framework, this initial income inequality turns out to be crucial to support the
theoretical hypothesis of Alesina and Angeletos (2005). Overall, we find that, only if the wage
inequality is high, subjects choose a lower level of income redistribution and provide a higher
effort level in the scenario in which high-wage subjects are selected based on their talent
through a tournament (than when it is randomly assigned). Thus, we confirm almost all
theoretical results in Alesina and Angeletos (2005) when the wage inequality is high enough.
The big exception is for efficiency (measured as the sum of total payoffs), since theoretical
results are not significant for both wage inequality scenarios.},
organization = {BBVA Foundation

BBVA2015-3},
organization = {Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad 	
ECO2016-76789-P},
publisher = {Elsevier},
keywords = {Income redistribution},
keywords = {Voting},
keywords = {Taxation},
keywords = {Real-effort task},
title = {The Effect of Initial Inequality on Meritocracy: a Voting Experiment on Tax Redistribution},
doi = {doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2018.09.019},
author = {Jiménez Jiménez, Natalia and Molís Bañales, Elena and Solano García, Ángel},
}