Overview
Ilyana Kuziemko is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a Research Associate at NBER. Her research spans public economics, labor economics, and behavioral economics, with a focus on inequality, redistribution, and the political economy of social policy. She is known for combining field and laboratory experiments with large administrative and survey datasets to study how individuals form preferences over redistributive policies and how social comparisons shape economic behavior.
Key Contributions / Features
- Last-place aversion — with Buell, Reich, and Norton (QJE 2014), named and documented last-place aversion (LPA): the behavioral preference for avoiding the lowest rank in a distribution that goes beyond standard inequality-aversion and risk-aversion models; showed that LPA predicts patterns of minimum wage opposition and soft redistribution support among near-poor individuals in GSS data; the laboratory evidence separates LPA from a comprehensive set of competing distributional-preference models
- Minimum wage preferences — the LPA paper's survey of low-wage workers documents that those just above the minimum wage have significantly lower support for a minimum wage increase, a finding with direct implications for understanding why minimum wage increases face opposition from the intended beneficiaries
- Redistribution and information — related work examining how information provision (e.g., about the tax code, income inequality) affects redistributive preferences
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