A Comment on "Acceptance of Inequality between Children: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from China and Norway" by Cappelen et al. (2025)
Cappelen et al. (2025) conduct an online experiment among Chinese and Norwegian adults to measure and compare the acceptance of inequality among children in the two societies. They find a significantly higher acceptance of inequality among children in China. The acceptance of inequality among children is also affected by the source of inequality and the costs associated with redistribution and is found to predict respondents’ attitudes towards child policies. In this discussion paper, we first successfully reproduce the main results of the paper. Doing so, we uncover a minor coding error, which, however, leaves the main results unchanged. We then conduct a number of robustness checks, including a redefinition of the main outcome variable and of some of the regressors. The main findings of the paper hold up to these robustness checks.