The Health of Democracies during the Pandemic: Results from a Randomized Survey Experiment

There is a growing global concern about the health of democracies (Rubin, 2022). Although support for civil liberties had weakened prior to COVID-19 – the pandemic and the public health responses it elicited could possibly accelerate a trend towards autocracy. Anticipating this threat, during the first few months of the pandemic our team conducted in-depth survey experiments across several Western democratic countries to assess whether providing information on stringent measures used to contain the virus in East Asian countries (i.e., China and South Korea) would affect citizens’ views regarding their willingness to curtail their own civil liberties.

Eliciting People’s First-Order Concerns

This paper illustrates the design and use of open-ended survey questions as a way of eliciting people’s first-order concerns on policies. Multiple choice questions are the backbone of most surveys, but they may prime respondents to select answer options that they would not naturally have thought about, and they may omit relevant options.

How to Run Surveys: A guide to creating your own identifying variation and revealing the invisible

This paper offers guidance to researchers on how to create surveys. It covers the complete survey process, the design of the questions and experiments to the recruitment of respondents, the collection of data to the analysis of survey responses, and more.

Social Positions and Fairness Views on Inequality

We link survey data on Danish people’s perceived income positions and views on inequality within various reference groups to administrative records on their reference groups, income histories, and life events.

Trust in Scientists in Times of Pandemic: Panel Evidence from 12 Countries

This article analyzes the specific and critical role of trust in scientists on both the support for and compliance with nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We exploit large-scale, longitudinal, and representative surveys for 12 countries over the period from March to December 2020, and we complement the analysis with experimental data.

Understanding Tax Policy: How do People Reason?

I study how people understand, reason, and learn about two major tax policies: income taxation and estate taxation. Using large-scale social economics surveys issued to representative U.S. samples and associated experiments, I elicit respondents’ factual knowledge about tax policy and the income or wealth distributions.

Diversity, Immigration and Redistribution

This paper provides a simple conceptual framework that captures how different perceptions, attitudes, and biases about immigrants or minorities can shape preferences for redistribution and reviews the empirical evidence on the effects of increasing racial diversity and immigration on support for redistribution.

The Polarization of Reality

Americans are polarized not only in their views on policy issues and attitudes towards government and society, but also in their perceptions of the same, factual reality.

Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis

We study to what extent individual preferences for protecting rights and civil liberties are elastic to health insecurity.

Disparities in Coronavirus 2019 Reported Incidence, Knowledge, and Behavior Among US Adults

In this survey study of US adults, there were gaps in reported incidence of COVID-19 and knowledge regarding its spread and symptoms and social distancing behavior. More effort is needed to increase accurate information and encourage appropriate behaviors among minority communities, men, and younger people.

Immigration and Redistribution

Does immigration change support for redistribution? We design and conduct large-scale surveys and experiments in six countries to investigate how people perceive immigrants and how these perceptions influence their support for redistribution. We find striking misperceptions about the number and characteristics of immigrants.

Intergenerational Mobility and Support for Redistribution​

Using new cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in France, Italy, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S.

How Elastic are Preferences for Redistribution?

We develop online survey experiments to analyze how information about inequality and taxes affects preferences for redistribution. Approximately 4,000 respondents were randomized into treatments providing interactive, customized information on U.S. income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax.