Jeffrey Yusof

🎉 Congratulations to @jyusof.bsky.social who has successfully defended his PhD Thesis: «Understanding Inequality and Redistribution: The Role of Perceptions and Preferences»!

🇩🇪 He will pursue a position as an assistant professor at the @unistuttgart.bsky.social

Research (n=65k in 60 countries) by @ingvildalm et al reveals a rich picture of people’s views on inequality, shaped less by the cost of redistribution than by views on fairness, which vary across countries (eg does inequality stem from merit or luck?):
buff.ly/zBQZNmm

Happy to attend the @cepr.org Workshop on People’s Understanding of and Support for Economic Policies workshop at St Gallen. I ll share some thoughts on this carefully curated workshop in this thread.

Next up, we have Jeff Yusof presenting joint work with Ricardo Perez-Truglia on Billionaire Superstar: Public Image and Demand for Taxation. They use an experiment where they used luxury queues -- pictures of their luxury homes -- in an informational experiment. Again, drawing links...

Verdachtsfall Rechtsextremismus: Wir veröffentlichen das 1.000-seitige Verfassungsschutz-Gutachten zur AfD Die Alternative für Deutschland steht im Verdacht, rechtsextrem und verfassungsfeindlich zu sein. Der Verfassungsschutz beobachtet die Partei und hat ein ausführliches Gutachten erstellt. Wir veröffen...

The German party AfD is suspected of being right-wing extremist and anti-constitutional. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has analyzed the party and generated a detailed report. We are publishing this document in full. netzpolitik.org/2025/verdach...

Whose Preferences Matter for Redistribution? Cross-Country Evidence | Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics: Vol 3, No 1 Using cross-sectional data from 93 countries, we investigate the relationship between the desired level of redistribution among citizens from different socioeconomic backgrounds and the actual extent ...

Very excited to see my (first!!!) publication with @acohn.bsky.social, @rfisman.bsky.social, and Michel Maréchal in print!🎉

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

@belindaarch.bsky.social and I have written a letter from economists regarding PEPFAR. Please sign and share with your network. Only economist signatures right now (for more focused impact). Once signed, we will share with the administration, congress, + the media. #econsky
forms.gle/C5roVX5sFF14...

Billionaire Superstar: Public Image and Demand for Taxation Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

and in my paper with Ricardo Perez-Truglia we study people's attitudes toward taxing billionaires.

www.nber.org/papers/w32712

[14/14]

Whose Preferences Matter for Redistribution: Cross-country Evidence Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

together with @acohn.bsky.social, Michel Maréchal, and @rfisman.bsky.social, we explore whose preferences are most predictive of actual redistribution…

nber.org/papers/w31974

[13/14]

In general, my work explores how people perceive inequality, how this shapes their preferences for redistribution, and their support for welfare policies.

In other projects…

[12/14]

Main take-away: Our results suggest that the conventional dichotomy of effort versus luck falls short of explaining redistributive preferences when market forces beyond individual control create inequality.

Link to paper: bit.ly/40y8XGM

[11/14]

But how do fairness preferences influence people’s support for real-world welfare policies?

We find that our experimental measures of fairness preferences are a strong predictor of support for welfare policies (controlling for SES and political affiliation).

[10/14]

Does the market luck effect generalize to real-world market settings?

In a complementary vignette study based on real-world scenarios, we again find that individuals perceive inequalities as fairer when caused by external market shocks rather than by brute luck.

[9/14]

Do we see similar patterns across different cultural contexts?

We ran additional experiments in France and China (N=3,500).

The order of implemented inequality is consistent across all countries (bl<ml<ef), but the magnitude of the market luck effect varies.

[8/14]

Additional treatments and analysis of open-ended answers show that:

– Mere presence of the buyer alone cannot explain the market luck effect.
– Workers’ deservingness increases when they generate a profit for the buyer.

[7/14]

We find a substantial market luck effect:

Spectators implement 50% more inequality (Gini coef) in the market luck treatment than in the brute luck treatment—about half of the effort treatment effect.

This difference mirrors the inequality gap between Denmark and the U.S.!

[6/14]

To benchmark our main treatment effect, we also implement an *effort* treatment:

Here, effort levels are no longer fixed; instead, relative performance on the task determines which worker receives the high income.

[5/14]

In our control treatment, there are no buyers, and income is determined by a coin flip - *brute luck *.

Key points:
1. In both treatments, which worker receives the high income is entirely random.
2. All workers provide the same level of effort.

[4/14]

How do people perceive these inequalities? How do they redistribute earnings between workers?

Our main outcome variable is the redistributive choices of nearly 2,000 subjects from the general U.S. population, who act as third-party spectators.

[3/14]

In this paper, co-authored with Simona Sartor, we design an experiment that creates income inequality between workers with different skills.

By randomly matching workers with buyers who require specific skills, we generate income inequalities driven by *market luck*.

[2/14]

🚨Job Market Paper Alert 🚨

A significant part of inequality stems from market forces beyond individual control - what we call *market luck*.

In meritocratic societies, this raises a key question: Do people perceive these inequalities as fair? [1/14]

Leistung und Glück: Wann wir Reichtum gerecht finden Wenn jemand durch Zufall reich wird, gilt das als unfair. Wenn sich jemand sein Glück hart erarbeitet und der Wind zusätzlich günstig steht, sieht es anders aus.

Excited to see my job market paper with Simona Sartor featured in the German news! 🔥

Read the article here (in German): faz.net/aktuell/wirt...

Time for a thread with more details about the paper. ⬇️

Thanks so much for posting our paper, Stephanie!

#eeca Day 14: @jyusof.bsky.social JMP with Simone Sartor: "Market Luck: Skill-Biased Inequality and Redistributive Preferences" They find more willingness to accept inequality produced by market forces (cultural differences in France and China?) drive.google.com/file/d/1vVwB... #econsky #econjmp

Looks super interesting - thanks for sharing!

And me, thanks so much!(:

As I am noticing some some momentum, here is a starter pack of 40+ profiles related to the Swiss 🇨🇭 economy 📈📉

go.bsky.app/9Hv8CCy

🐄🍫🧀🏔️⌚💡

Spend 1$ on auditing

>90th income percentile: get 12$ back
<50th income percentile: get 5$ back

📯Call for Papers!

🔹1st Berlin Micro Theory and Behavioral Economics PhD Conference

📅July 7-9, 2025 at @WZB_Berlin
✍️Submission deadline: January 20, 2025

More information, and how to apply: www.wzb.eu/en/events/1s...

#EconTwitter #CfP

Gun Companies Gave Customers’ Sensitive Personal Information to Political Operatives At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington and Mossberg, secretly handed over names, addresses and other data to lobbyists, who used the details to rally firearm o...

The gun industry launched a secret project in the late 1990s.

To elect gun-friendly politicians, manufacturers gave political operatives sensitive, intimate information on their customers without their consent.

The story behind the data sharing and its impact has never been revealed.

Until now.