What You Earn—or What It Creates?

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Mariadolores Schiavone, a PhD researcher at Bocconi university

A large literature shows that support for taxation depends on whether income is seen as the result of effort, luck, and broader notions of deservingness. This paper asks whether tax preferences also reflect the perceived social value of the activities through which income is earned. I field two conjoint experiments in which respondents assign desired tax rates to pairs of hypothetical taxpayers characterized by their effort, family background, occupation, and earnings. The first covers taxpayers across the general income distribution; the second focuses on individuals in the top 1%. A separate module collects respondents' own ratings of the occupations' social value, allowing me to assess whether occupational effects vary systematically with these ratings or with background characteristics. By isolating the role of social value, the design can detect a potential violation of horizontal equity: whether the public is willing to tax individuals with identical incomes differently, depending on the nature of their work.

The zoom link will be sent upon registration.