Populism, characterized by a rhetoric of ``the people'' versus ``the elite'', is on the rise in Western democracies. This paper examines how local social mobility environments relate to populist attitudes and voting behavior. Linking novel survey data from the US with electoral outcomes and social mobility measures at the county-level, I find that higher local mobility is associated with lower support for populist attitudes and Trump votes. To explore the role of social mobility beliefs, I collect over 3,450 respondent-generated narratives of upward mobility and classify them as "luck-based" or "effort-based" using a large language model. To identify the causal effect of lucky-ascent beliefs on populism, I conduct a survey experiment in which 2,000 respondents are randomly exposed to luck-based ascent narratives. Exposure raises populist attitudes by decreasing beliefs in the role of merit, particularly among men, individuals without a college degree, and those without upward mobility experience.

We investigate how beliefs about wage inequality impact preferences for redistribution with more than 9,000 respondents in six high-income countries. Using nationally representative, randomized survey experiments and a novel distribution builder tool, we elicit detailed beliefs about wage inequality and examine the impact of accurate information on support for redistribution. We find most respondents underestimate wage inequality and that information treatments have minimal effects, except for respondents on the far-right, who exhibit large increases in support for higher income taxes and social spending. This finding suggests that far-right voters have limited support for redistribution partly because they underestimate wage inequality.

While consumer sentiment is a key macroeconomic indicator tied to employment and inflation, its response to targeted government policies remains less understood. This study addresses that gap by examining the causal link between fiscal interventions and household confidence, using the 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion as a natural experiment. The CTC provided monthly payments that lifted incomes—particularly for lower-income families—until it abruptly expired in early 2022. Drawing on microdata from the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Survey, we show that removing this crucial support triggered a pronounced drop in economic confidence, most severe among lower-income households and those with multiple children. In contrast, higher-income families saw no substantial change in sentiment. Our findings demonstrate that government policies like the CTC can have significant effects on consumer sentiment, underscoring their vital role for vulnerable populations who rely heavily on such financial support to maintain economic stability.

One of the main insights of public economics is that taxes are not necessarily borne by those who pay the taxes. However, public debates about taxation rarely consider tax shifting. Using corporate taxation as an example, we investigate in a survey experiment whether individuals' preferences for taxation change when they are informed about four channels of tax shifting: prices, wages, owner payouts, or investments. We find that the preferred corporate tax rate decreases when the burden falls onto individuals (in terms of prices and wages), and less so when we reveal the effect on payouts or investments. The change is caused by own perceived costs, distributional concerns seem to play only a limited role for the reaction to the information.