Majlinda Joxhe (University of Bologna)
Luca Bonacini and Giuseppe Pignataro
This paper investigates how awareness of inequality influences preferences for taxation and redistribution. We conducted a large-scale randomized experiment with more than 20,000 participants in Italy, where individuals were asked about their preferred distribution of the tax burden across income groups before and after exposure to short videos on different dimensions of inequality (income, gender, education, and immigration). Our results show that exposure to inequality information, particularly on income disparities, significantly increases support for taxing the top 1% and reduces the burden assigned to the bottom 50% in the short run. The effects of other treatments are weaker and more heterogeneous across subgroups. However, a follow-up survey conducted several months later reveals that these effects largely vanish over time, indicating that inequality awareness shapes tax preferences temporarily rather than persistently. These findings underscore both the potential and the limitations of information campaigns: they can meaningfully shift redistribution preferences in the moment, but sustaining these changes may require repeated or more intensive interventions.