Alesina, A., &La Ferrara, E. (2005). Preferences for redistribution in the land of opportunities. Journal of public Economics, 89(5-6), 897-931.
This paper explores how individual preferences for redistribution depend on future income prospects. In addition to estimating the impact of individuals' socioeconomic background and of their subjective perceptions of future mobility, we employ panel data to construct ‘objective’ measures of expected gains and losses from redistribution for different categories of individuals. We find that such measures have considerable explanatory power and perform better than ‘general ...