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

Abstract

Giuliano 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.