A Comment on "Your Place in the World: Relative Income and Global Inequality" by Fehr, Mollerstrom and Perez-Truglia (2022)

Fehr, Mollerstrom and Perez-Truglia (2022) studied individual preferences for policies addressing global inequality by conducting a two-year, face-to-face survey experiment on a representative sample of Germans from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). They found that Germans systematically underestimated their true place in the global income distribution; that these misperceptions were persistent; and that correcting those misperceptions did not affect their support for polices related to global inequality (while information provision about national relative income affected demand for national redistribution, but only for left-of-center respondents). In this replication report, we present the results from a computational reproduction and robustness replication of Fehr et al. (2022). While direct access to the SOEP microdata is restricted, we were able to obtain access for these reproduction and replication purposes. We confirm that the original study is computationally reproducible and that the main results are generally robust to the following alterations: controlling for political left instead of party; using an extended set of control variables; and dropping observations with missing values.