Understanding Preferences for Income Redistribution

We are grateful for funding under the Robock Award in Empirical Economics from the University of Wisconsin. Wei-Yin Loh provided invaluable advice on the implementation of the tree regression methods employed in this paper. Keely thanks WARF and the Brookings Institution for generous research support, and Brookings for their hospitality. Tan thanks the generous research support provided by the Program of Fellowships for Junior Scholars, MacArthur Research Network on Social Interactions and Economic Inequality. We greatly appreciate the excellence and diligence of our research assistant, Abstract Recent research suggests that income redistribution preferences vary across identity groups. We employ a new pattern recognition technology, tree regression analysis, to uncover what these groups are. Using data from the General Social Survey, we present a new stylized fact that preferences for governmental provision of income redistribution vary systematically with race, gender, and class background. We explore the extent to which existing theories of income redistribution can explain our results, but conclude that current approaches do not fully explain the findings.