Raymond Fisman, Columbia Business School
Raymond Fisman, Columbia Business School
The Distributional Preferences of an Elite
The Distributional Preferences of an Elite
Please note our seminar with Ray Fisman will be held in Tata Conference Room 120, rather than our usual meeting space in Cotting House.
Summary: We study the distributional preferences of an elite cadre of J.D. students at Yale Law School (YLS), a group that hold particular interest because they will assume future positions of power and influence in American society. Our experimental design provides a rigorous test of the rationality of redistributive decisions and allows us to decompose the underlying distributional preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs: the tradeoff between fair-mindedness and self-interest, and the tradeoff between equality and efficiency. We find that the YLS subjects are much more rational than subjects drawn from the online American Life Panel (ALP) --- a large and diverse sample of Americans. The YLS subjects are also less fair-minded than the ALP subjects, and, most importantly, substantially and significantly less inclined to sacrifice efficiency to reduce inequality. We further show that our experimental measure of equality-efficiency tradeoffs predicts the YLS students' career choices: equality-minded subjects are significantly more likely to be employed at non-profit organizations. Finally, we show that two samples of “intermediate” elites display distributional preferences that lie between the YLS elite and the general population, providing further external validation for the experimental results.
Raymond Fisman is the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and co-director of the Social Enterprise Program at the Columbia Business School. His research – on topics ranging from corruption to racial preferences in dating to the impact of corporate philanthropy – has been published in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. Professor Fisman’s work has been covered widely in the popular press, from Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times to al Jazeera to the Shanghai Daily. He also writes a monthly column for Slate magazine. His book, The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office, with Tim Sullivan, was published in January 2013.