Secure property rights are essential for generating wealth, yet in most societies property is distributed very unevenly. This project uses a novel laboratory paradigm to study when and why individuals voluntarily comply with such unequal property rules in the absence of formal enforcement.
Two laboratory studies show that voluntary redistribution can restore compliance and raise efficiency, and that the threat of losing their privileged position does not, on its own, make economic elites more generous.
Secure property rights are essential for generating wealth, yet in most societies property is distributed very unevenly. Effective self-enforcement requires that those who own little accept the right of others to own much. We develop a laboratory paradigm in which players produce wealth by respecting a non-binding status ranking that creates an efficient but highly unequal distribution of payoffs. To restore balance, they can make use of voluntary redistribution.
In “Property, Redistribution, and the Status Quo” (Experimental Economics, 2021), we show that voluntary redistribution increases the security of property rights and raises efficiency from 47% to 67%. Redistribution benefits all status groups, and is most effective at fostering compliance when transfers are imposed by an external administration rather than left to the players' discretion. In the absence of coercive enforcement, it is the higher-status players — not the lower-status players — who benefit most from compulsory rather than voluntary redistribution.
In “Does the Threat of Overthrow Discipline the Elites?” (Journal of Legal Studies, 2022), we test a long-standing conjecture from the social sciences: that economic elites strategically share some of their wealth to prevent social unrest and preserve their privileges. Contrary to that conjecture, we find that the threat of being overthrown does not, on average, make elites more generous. Instead, overthrows act as a selection mechanism: groups only stabilize and prosper once an overthrow puts intrinsically generous players into high-status positions.
Publication in peer-reviewed journal
