title: Inequality, Fairness and Social Capital
creator: Fehr, Dietmar
creator: Rau, Hannes
creator: Trautmann, Stefan T.
creator: Xu, Yilong
subject: ddc-330
subject: 330 Economics
description: We study the impact of unjust inequality on social trust and trustworthiness, and its separate effect on the economically successful and the unsuccessful, in a controlled economic experiment. We find evidence for a negative effect of unfair economic inequality on social interactions. Probing the boundaries of this effect, we document that this erosion of social capital critically depends on the context: if a well-off person is not directly responsible for the outcome of the worse-off person, then we observe no negative effects on trust and trustworthiness in the aggregate. Moreover, our data do not support the view that higher status or wealth leads to an erosion of pro-social attitudes: the successful are always more generous; groups of unsuccessful persons are least efficient and least generous in the trust game.
date: 2018-07-10
type: Working paper
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/25085/1/Fehr%2C%20Rau%2CTrautmann%2C%20and%20Xu_2018_dp_0650.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00025085
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-250853
identifier:   Fehr, Dietmar ; Rau, Hannes ; Trautmann, Stefan T. ; Xu, Yilong  (2018) Inequality, Fairness and Social Capital.  [Working paper]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/25085/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng