Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Department of Social Sciences - Berlin Graduate School of Social Science

Cohort

BGSS Generation 2014

Sess.EuroPhD

Title

The role of fairness preferences and perceptions of social justice in the Inequality-Growth Nexus

Supervisor

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schupp

Prof. Dr. Johannes Giesecke

Abstract

In the current literature, both, the influence of perceptions of social justice and corresponding fariness preferences on redistributive preferences and  actual redistribution, as well as the connection between actual (income) inequalitiy and growth have been extensively investigated in both, theoretical and empirical literature. The relationship between fairness preferences and perceptions of social justice and growth, however, has been largely neglected in both, theoretical and empirical literature so far. This thesis aims to identify potential theoretical links between perceptions of social justice, fairness preferences and growth and to test the potential linkages against empirical data. I will use existing data from international databases, such as the World Values Survey to conduct large cross- sectional studies, but I also plan to conduct in depth studies for a number of hand-selected countries, that pose a particularly interesting case. The bottleneck of this research project is the availability of data on fairness preferences and beliefs on social justice. The choice of the best empirical method for the analysis therefore guided by the availability of the data. In the case that data-availability does not allow the standard approach of performing both, cross-sectional studies and panel-estimations on the entire dataset, the possibility of performing a Fixed Effect Vector Decomposition Estimator may have to be considered.