Meet the Oligarchs: Business Legitimacy and Taxation at the Top

We study the causal impact of trust in business elites and trust in government on preferences for taxation at the top. Using new survey data, we find that distrust causes an increase in desired taxes on the top 1 percent. For example, our distrust-in-business-elites treatment leads to an increase in desired taxes on the top 1 percent of 2.4 percentage points (it closes 27 percent of the Democrat-Republican gap in tax preferences) when trust in government is low; a similar result is obtained for our distrust-in-government treatment.