Essays on attitudes towards economic inequality ; Essais sur les attitudes envers l'inégalité économique

The three chapters of this dissertation study individual attitudes towards economics inequality. The common focus of the chapters is to study how these attitudes are shaped by the economic environment and context. It, thereby, improves our general understanding of the prevalence, shapes and consequences of attitudes towards economic inequality. The first chapter uses a lab experiment to assess the relative importance of different motives behind attitudes to income inequality. The results show that, among others things, incomes prospects are essential to finding broad acceptance of economic inequality. The second chapter asks whether principals’ distributive preferences affect the allocation of incentives within firms. We first document a robust relationship between French employers’ fairness preferences and the incentive contracts they chose for theirs workers. We then run a Principal-Agent lab experiment to study trade-off between incentives and distributive preferences in more detail. Our results show that principals’ distributive preferences affect incentivization decisions and that they are sensitive to extensive and intensive margin incentives. The third chapter studies whether individuals distort their beliefs about the relative importance of effort and luck (an important determinant of inequality attitudes) to motivate themselves to exert effort. Using an online experiment, I show that subjects indeed distort luck-effort beliefs to motivate themselves to exert effort, suggesting that these beliefs are also endogenous to the incentive structure individuals face. ; Cette thèse étudie comment les attitudes individuelles sont façonnées par l'environnement et le contexte économiques, et permet donc d’améliorer notre connaissance générale de la prévalence, de la forme et des conséquences des attitudes envers les inégalités de revenus. Le chapitre n°1 utilise une expérience de laboratoire pour évaluer l’importance relative des différents motifs qui sous-tendent les attitudes envers les inégalités de revenus. Les ...