Living in the Garden of Eden: Mineral resources and preferences for redistribution

We document a positive relationship between mineral resources and opposition to redistribution in the US. * We take advantage of both the spatial and the temporal distributions of mineral discoveries since 1800 to uncover two persistence mechanisms. * The experience mechanism arises because of direct observation of discoveries by individuals. transmission mechanism consists in the persistence of specific values across generations. This paper provides empirical evidence that mineral resources abundance is associated to preferences for redistribution in the United States. We show that individual... Mehr ...