Revisiting the effect of growing up in a recession on attitudes towards redistribution

Abstract

SummaryGiuliano and Spilimbergo (2014) show that individuals who experienced a recession when young are more likely to favor redistribution in the short and long run. We revisit their analysis in three ways. First, we conduct a narrow replication in the General Social Survey and the World Values Survey; we successfully replicate the original results for outcomes that directly measure preferences for redistribution, but the results for other outcomes are less clear‐cut. Second, adding recent survey waves yields results similar to the narrow replication. Third, a wide replication in a different dataset (International Social Survey Programme) corroborates the original results.