Jean-Robert Tyran

Jean-Robert Tyran is professor of public economics at the University of Vienna and director of the Vienna Center for Experimental Economics. He is a research fellow at various institutions (including CEPR, London; CESifo, Munich) and has held numerous visiting positions (Harvard Kennedy School, Caltech, among others).

The project

Title: An experimental approach to understanding social mobility

"This research project aims at understanding the effectiveness and acceptance of policy interventions to improve social mobility. I am interested in polarization in society which results from a lack of social mobility. Such polarization occurs when inequality of incomes (and of opportunities in life more generally) lead to persistent stratification of people into income classes. Persistence means that those at the bottom of the income distribution tend to remain there. It means that these people have no prospect of upward mobility and prosperity. Instead, these people are socially excluded and “down and out” which may politically alienate and disenfranchise them and may economically discourage them to invest in their skills or to work hard. The focus of my project is on economic and social policies (e.g. taxation and redistribution, affirmative action, subsidized access to education) that might help to reduce such polarization by increasing social mobility. I plan to study the theoretical properties of such policies and to test their power to predict behavioral outcomes in economic experiments. Ultimately, I am interested in the perceived legitimacy and the political acceptance of policies that reduce the polarization."

Hosting institution: Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• "Self-Signaling in Voting", with Mechtenberg, L., Perino, G., Treich, N., and Wang, S.W. Journal of Public Economics 2024, 231: 105070.
• "Civic Engagement, the Leverage Effect and the Accountable State", with Kamei, K. and Putterman, L. European Economic Review 2023, 156: 104466.
• "Fake News, Voter Overconfidence, and the Quality of Democratic Choice", with Kartal, M. American Economic Review 2022, 112(10): 3367-97.
• "The Price of Prejudice", with Hedegaard, M. American  Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2018, 10(1): 40-63 (Appendix).