The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the impact of moral emotions (sympathy and empathy) and religious education on individual behavior. This dissertation is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter examines the effect of sympathy and empathy on tax compliance. We run a series of experiments in which we employ methods such as priming, the Davis Empathic Concern scale, and questions about frequency of prosocial behaviors in the past year in order to promote and to identify empathy and sympathy in subjects. We observe the subjects’ decisions in a series of one-shot tax compliance game presented at once and with no immediate feedback. Our results suggest that the presence and/or the promotion of sympathy in most cases encourage tax compliance. The second chapter takes into consideration religious schooling as a way of helping the development of religiosity or morality on individuals. Our intent is to investigate the effect of religious education on charitable donations in adulthood. Our empirical analysis is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics dataset. Our estimation results indicate that there is a positive effect of religious education on donations to secular and religious organizations. The third chapter explores the hypothesis that sympathetic individuals are more likely to support income redistribution because they believe that the poor may benefit from this policy. We use data from the General Social Survey to estimate support for income distribution. Our results suggest that some measures of sympathy have a positive effect on support for redistribution. Across all three main chapters, we find that sympathy has mostly small and positive effects on the types of behavior examined in this dissertation, although we are not able to determine the impact of religious education on charitable donations. Despite the sometimes weak results of this research caused by the limitations of the available data and the complexity of the issues studied, we believe that the development of these moral emotions is likely to generate benefits to society.

Despite considerable research efforts, the relationship between inequality and demand for redistribution remains a highly contested topic within comparative political economy. This paper argues that a central yet widely overlooked mechanism linking macro-level income inequality to preferences for redistribution has to with the micro-level implications of certain externalities of inequality. Focusing on fear of crime, as one such externality, I argue that because (i) in- equality and crime are positively related, and (ii) because crime and fear of crime have a negative effect in individual utility, it follows that increasing in- equality should have a positive effect on support for redistribution. Importantly, however, the argument of this paper also recognises that redistribution is but one of several means through which a concern about crime can be addressed, with the most relevant alternatives being increased policing and harsher punitive measures. Drawing on literatures in criminology and political sociology, I theorise that a key determinant of this choice | between redistribution and policing/punishment as alternative approaches to dealing with crime | is the level of ethnic heterogeneity in the population. Taken together, therefore, this paper's argument implies that inequality will have differential effects on support for redistribution in different contexts: in cases where the population is homogenous, fear of crime - and by consequence inequality - will boost demand for redistribution, whilst no such effects will follow in contexts of high heterogeneity. Using a two-step statistical methodology, I analyse Eurobarometer and ESS data from 21 OECD countries and find persuasive empirical support for my theoretical expectations. Fear of crime is more strongly associated to support for redistribution when the level of population heterogeneity remains low, whilst the opposite holds true for the relationship between fear of crime and support for policing and punishment.