Understanding Social Mobility - An Experimental Approach

This project experimentally investigates the relevance of the following structural determinants of social mobility: the degree to which success is driven by luck rather than effort, discrimination, wage compression, and the degree of social stratification. We explore how different policy interventions such as income or inheritance taxes affect social mobility under varying structural conditions. We also investigate peoples’ acceptance of alternative policy measures by the means of of voting. We generate benchmark predictions that we put to a test in the economic laboratory.