When Economists Disagree : Beliefs, Values, and Policy endorsements

Economists frequently take opposing positions in public policy debates. To investigate the respective roles of beliefs about how the economy works and normative values in these disagreements, we survey academic economists who publicly took opposing positions on the economic program of the Nouveau Front Populaire, a broad left-wing electoral alliance, during the 2024 French legislative campaign. We elicit their beliefs about inequality and the cost of redistribution, and measure their inequality aversion through a leaky-bucket task. We find substantial differences between endorsers and non-endorsers in both beliefs and distributive preferences. Moreover, beliefs and inequality aversion are strongly correlated, substantially more so than in a representative sample of the French population. Both dimensions help account for economists’ policy positions. Our findings suggest that economists’ policy disagreements involve both empirical assessments and normative values, and that these two dimensions are themselves closely intertwined.