GINI DP 3: New Dataset of Educational Inequality

This paper describes a new dataset collecting measures of educational level and inequality for 31 countries over several birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international datasets (ESS, EIJSILC, IALS and ISSP), we collect measures of individual educational attainment and aggregate them to generate synthetic indices of education level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research. The .csv, .dta, .xml dataset is readily available to GINI members (see website data portal); other scholars may put in a request to the authors YEL Classification: I21, D30, Y1

Collective negative shocks and preferences for redistribution: Evidence from the COVID-19 crisis in Germany

Using new data from a three-wave panel survey administered in Germany between May 2020 and May 2021, this paper studies the impact of a negative shock affecting all strata of the population, such as the development of COVID-19, on preferences for redistribution. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous change in the severity of the infection rate at the county level, we show that, contrary to some theoretical expectations, the worse the crisis, the less our respondents expressed support for redistribution. We provide further evidence that this is not driven by a decrease in inequality aversion but might be driven by the individuals’ level of trust

A New Dataset on Educational Inequality

This paper describes a new dataset collecting measures of educational level and inequality for 31 countries over several birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international datasets ESS, EIJ­SILC, IALS and ISSP), the authors collect measures of individual educational attainment and aggregate them to generate synthetic indices of education level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research

Exposure to democracy and MEPs attitude toward EU integration

This paper analyzes the effect of exposure to democracy during adolescence and early adulthood on the pro-EU attitude of the members of the European Parliament. Relying on the psychological theory of `impressionable years’, we test whether members exposed to less democratic regimes at the age of 18 to 25 have a higher probability of voting against pro-EU instances in the roll-call-voting of the first six legislatures, from 1979 to 2009. Our results suggest that exposure to democracy increases the probability of voting in favor of pro-EU policies by about 2%-7%, depending on the legislature. We find that the effect is stronger in votes with a significant cleavage on EU instances, while it is irrelevant in votes that do not involve them. Our results take into account heterogeneity in political groups, country of election, year of birth, and legislature and resist several robustness checks

Social media charity campaigns and pro-social behaviour. Evidence from the Ice Bucket Challenge

Social media use plays an important role in shaping individuals’ social attitudes and economic behaviours. One of the first well-known examples of social media campaigns is the Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC), a charity campaign that went viral on social media networks in August 2014, aiming to collect money for research on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We rely on UK longitudinal data to investigate the causal impact of the Ice Bucket Challenge on pro-social behaviours. In detail, this study shows that having been exposed to the IBC increases the probability of donating money, and it also increases the amount of money donated among those who donate at most £100. We also find that exposure to the IBC has increased the probability of volunteering and the level of interpersonal trust. However, all these results, except for the result on the intensive margins of donations, are of short duration and are limited to less than one year. This supports the prevalent consensus that social media campaigns may have only short-term effects

Inequalities' Impacts: State of the Art Review

By way of introduction This report provides the fi rm foundation for anchoring the research that will be performed by the GINI project. It subsequently considers the fi elds covered by each of the main work packages: ● inequalities of income, wealth and education, ● social impacts, ● political and cultural impacts, and ● policy effects on and of inequality. Though extensive this review does not pretend to be exhaustive. The review may be “light” in some respects and can be expanded when the analysis evolves. In each of the four fi elds a signifi cant number of discussion papers will be produced, in total well over 100. These will add to the state of the art while also covering new round and generating results that will be incorporated in the Analysis Reports to be prepared for the work packages. In that sense, the current review provides the starting point. At the same time, the existing body of knowledge is broader or deeper depending on the particular fi eld and its tradition of research. The very motivation of GINI’s focused study of the impacts of inequalities is that a systematic study is lacking and relatively little is known about those impacts. This also holds for the complex collection of, the effects that inequality can have on policy making and the contributions that policies can make to mitigating inequalities but also to enhancing them. By contrast, analyses of inequality itself are many, not least because there is a wide array of inequalities; inequalities have become more easily studied comparatively and much of that analysis has a signifi cant descriptive fl avour that includes an extensive discussion of measurement issues. @GINI hopes to go beyond that and cover the impacts of inequalities at the same time