Living in the Garden of Eden: Mineral resources and preferences for redistribution

•We document a positive relationship between mineral resources and opposition to redistribution in the US.•We take advantage of both the spatial and the temporal distributions of mineral discoveries since 1800 to uncover two persistence mechanisms.•The experience mechanism arises because of direct observation of discoveries by individuals.•The transmission mechanism consists in the persistence of specific values across generations.

This paper provides empirical evidence that mineral resources abundance is associated to preferences for redistribution in the United States. We show that individuals living in states with large mineral resources endowment are more opposed to redistribution than others. We take advantage of both the spatial and the temporal distributions of mineral resources discoveries since 1800 to uncover two mechanisms through which mineral resources can foster ones' opposition to redistribution: either by transmission of values formed in the past, or by the exposure to mineral discoveries during individuals' life-time. We show that both mechanisms matter to explain respondents' preferences.