Dietmar Fehr

Support for Global Redistribution in Germany

Dietmar Fehr, together with Johanna Mollerstrom and Ricardo Perez-Truglia, has examined the drivers for support for global redistribution. Using a two-year-long survey experiment on a representative sample of German citizens, the paper shows that Germans systematically underestimate their true place in the global income distribution, but that correcting those misperceptions does not affect their support for policies related to global inequality. Instead, they reduce their support for redistributive policies if they realize that they are richer than they thought. This is particularly true for left-leaning individuals.

Mr. Fehr is an applied microeconomist interested in fairness views, in the determinants and consequences of economic inequality, and in the consequences of poverty. His research has been published in leading journals, such as the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and Journal of Monetary Economics. During his stay at CESifo he will explore options for collaboration within the newly established Economic Experts Survey (EES).

Dietmar Fehr is Assistant Professor in the Alfred Weber Institute for Economics (AWI) at Heidelberg University. He holds a PhD from TU Berlin and previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). He was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College and at UC Berkeley, is an Affiliate Member in the CESifo Research Network, and a Senior Fellow in the Politics of Inequality Cluster of Excellence at the University of Konstanz.