PSE Internal Seminar

Du 26/04/2024 de 12:00 à 13:00

HUANG Yuchen(PSE)
ELLISON Sara(MIT)

Non-Meritocrats or Conformist Meritocrats? A Redistribution Experiment in China and France

Recent empirical evidence contends that meritocratic ideals are mainly a Western phenomenon. Intriguingly, the Chinese people appear to not differentiate between merit- and luck-based inequalities, despite their rich historical legacy of meritocratic institutions. We propose that this phenomenon might be due to the Chinese public's greater adherence towards the status quo. In order to test this hypothesis, we run an incentivized redistribution experiment with elite university students in China and France, by varying the initial split of payoffs between two real-life workers to redistribute from. We show that Chinese respondents consistently and significantly choose more non-redistribution (playing the status quo) across both highly unequal and relatively equal status quo scenarios than our French respondents. Additionally, we also show that the Chinese sample does differentiate between merit- and luck-based inequalities, and does not redistribute less than the French absent status quo conformity. Ultimately, we contend that such a phenomenon is indicative of low political agency rather than apathy, inattention, or libertarian beliefs among the Chinese. Notably, our findings show that Chinese individuals' conformity to the status quo is particularly pronounced among those from families of working-class and farming backgrounds, while it is conspicuously absent among individuals whose families have closer ties to the private sector........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Vacation home rental websites like VRBO and AirBNB are close-to-textbook examples of how web-enabled reductions in transactions costs could lead to substantial improvements in social welfare through more efficient use of a fixed resource. Such websites, however, have attracted a great deal of criticism from the very start. If houses become easier to rent online to vacationers, for instance, then houses in the primary-home market may be shifted to the rental market, exacerbating shortages and driving up prices for primary homebuyers. We use two comprehensive and detailed data sets—one on New Hampshire housing stock and transactions over the past twenty years and one on personal mobility from cell-phone pings—to identify vacation-appropriate homes and then examine the changes in the markets for both vacation homes and primary homes, and the spillovers between them.