Unequal Opportunities, Social Groups, and Redistribution

In this paper, we investigate the role of unequal opportunities and social group membership in preferences for redistribution. We present results from a large-scale online experiment with more than 4,000 participants. The experiment features a real-effort task and a subsequent dictator game with native Germans and immigrants to Germany. We find that dictator transfers are higher under unequal opportunities than under equal opportunities in the real-effort task. Furthermore, different from native dictators, who transfer equal amounts to both groups, immigrant dictators transfer more to in-group than to out-group receivers under unequal opportunities. Finally, we show that political preferences partly explain transfer behavior.