Does Distributional Skewness Lead to Redistribution? Evidence from the United States

This paper presents time‐series, cross‐section, and historical evidence from the United States to test whether distributional skewness leads to the adoption of redistributive policies. On all accounts the theory performs poorly: we fail to find evidence either of a long‐run stable relationship or of short‐run causation between distributional skewness and redistribution in the time‐series data; the cross‐section data uncover no correlation between skewness and welfare spending or support of the Democratic Party; and analysis of the historical evidence shows that key changes in redistributive institutions in the United States were not preceded by increases in distributional skewness.