Magdalena Wasilewska

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and the Tinbergen Institute under the supervision of Joël van der Weele and Thomas Douenne.

My research is in behavioral and experimental economics. I am interested in how individuals perceive and reason about economic inequality, and what determines beliefs about fairness and policy preferences.

Before starting my PhD, I obtained an MSc in Economics from the University of Amsterdam, an MSc in Social Data Science from KU Leuven.

You can find my CV here.

Please contact me at: m.j.wasilewska(at)uva.nl

I will be on the Economics Job Market in the 2026/2027 cycle.

Placement Director Prof. Eric Bartelsman (e.j.bartelsman@vu.nl)

Placement Assistant Christina Mansson (c.mansson@tinbergen.nl)

Research

Job Market Paper:

Fairness at a Price: Support for Complex Benefit Systems [link]

Directing benefits to those in need requires complex rules and procedures, which impose substantial transaction costs on claimants. This has sparked debates about simplifying benefit systems. I study how people trade off distributional fairness against the transaction costs of achieving it. In a spectator experiment, impartial participants choose between two bonus systems for workers, some of whom experienced a random earnings shock; the systems differ in targeting accuracy and effort costs workers incur to receive the bonus. In a Dutch survey experiment, I provide information about the costs of complexity and measure its effect on support for simplification. The results speak to the political economy of reform. First, most spectators are willing to impose substantial effort costs on workers for a modest improvement in accuracy. Second, this willingness decreases when effort costs are higher and when imposing them improves distributional fairness rather than achieving it perfectly, as real benefit systems rarely do. Third, information shifts Dutch respondents' beliefs but increases support for a simpler, less targeted system only among non-recipients of benefits, although recipients hold equally inaccurate priors and update as much. Recipients' open-ended answers instead point to their stake in the system and to uncertainty about their entitlements after reform.

Working Papers:

Do People Distinguish Income from Wealth Inequality? Evidence from the Netherlands. [link] with Thomas Douenne, Oda Sund, and Joël van der Weele R&R at The Economic Journal

In most countries, wealth inequality is much higher than income inequality, spurring debates about wealth taxation. We study people's perceptions of income and wealth inequality using a survey-experiment linked to administrative records for the Dutch population. We document a strong overlap in perceptions about the two distributions: people largely underestimate the difference between the respective levels of inequality and use information about income (inequality, own rank) to predict wealth and vice versa, even when information about both is provided. Informing people about inequality or their own rank has direct effects on their beliefs, but little effect on their policy preferences.

Work in Progress:

Inequality Narratives and Redistribution with Thomas Douenne, Oda Sund, and Joël van der Weele

How do people explain economic inequality, and how do these personal narratives shape responses to narratives provided by others? We field two linked surveys on representative samples of the Dutch population, conducted two years apart and linked to administrative tax data, and document three findings. First, open-ended ``top-of-mind'' explanations show that most respondents attribute inequality to structural factors (the labor market, family background, education, and the tax system) rather than effort or luck, and that these narratives vary with wealth, political identity, and fairness views. Second, linking the surveys, narratives independently predict redistributive preferences two years later, as well as which narratives respondents expose themselves to when given a choice. Third, experimentally provided narratives shift emotions and beliefs about the meritocracy of education, but not redistributive attitudes; updating is constrained by prior beliefs, and counter-attitudinal expert narratives can even backfire. Inequality narratives are thus durable elements of worldviews, robust to short-run interventions.

Salience and Meritocracy

Teaching

Economics in a Global Business World, BSc Business Administration, Teaching Assistant (2023 – present)
Thesis supervision: 20 BSc theses (Economics and Business Economics; PPLE) and 1 MSc thesis (Economics) (2023 – present)

Beyond Research

I am part of the Outreach team at the Women in Economics Initiative.
Non-academic writing:
- Vooral mensen met een hypotheek steunen de hypotheekrenteaftrek, Economisch Statistische Berichten, with Joël van der Weele, November 2025
- Sukces to stan umysłu? Bogaci chętnie zapominają o szczęściu, które im sprzyjało, Krytyka Polityczna, October 2025