a credible signal of trustworthiness from the state, cash transfers are also likely to be perceived as carrying the highest risk of capture.

Our paper contributes to several strands of research. Much of the existing literature on preferences for redistribution is based on opinion survey data (for example, Alesina and Angeletos 2005; Alesina, Di Tella, and MacCulloch 2004; Alesina and La Ferrara 2002). We add to this literature by providing rigorous evidence from a field experiment that elicits preferences on redistribution in a setting where participants face real tradeoffs, while maintaining the national representativeness of the results. In doing so, we also complement and extend the existing behavioral economics literature that investigates altruistic behavior using samples of higher-education students in laboratory settings (e.g., Charness and Rabin 2002; Fehr and Schmidt 2003). While also using real trade-offs to evaluate subjects’preferences, inference from laboratory studies explores human behavior through selected samples that may not be representative of the population of interest. Field behavioral experiments testing altruistic behavior have been less common, have never been based on nationally representative samples, and have not tested the effects of enhanced transparency (Parra 2011; Johansson-Stenman, Mahmud, and Martinsson 2009).

Finally, the causal estimates we offer based on a nationally representative sample contribute to inform pressing policy issues in developing countries, where many governments are deliberating whether and how to shift resources away from costly universal subsidies, which benefit the middle and upper classes the most, and toward more effi cient forms of social safety nets (Silva, Levin, and Morgandi 2013, World Bank 2015).<sup>6</sup> Besides the redistributive implications, one of the main challenges of a policy shift away from subsidies is the high deficit of trust that governments face as they attempt to replace an easyto-monitor price subsidy for everyone with a targeted social safety net that can deliver better impacts for the poor and vulnerable at a lower cost. Indeed, important episodes of civil unrest in Jordan in the past decade were linked to attempted reforms of utility or consumption subsidies (Atamanov, Jellema, and Serajuddin 2015).<sup>7</sup>

> 6 The Jordan Gives experiment was accompanied by a survey module added to the the Gallup World Poll on citizens’willingness to reform fuel subsidies, preferred design of reformed safety nets, and willingness to support the reform if preferred safety nets were implemented. The survey was conducted on nationally representative samples in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. Most respondents in all four countries preferred savings from fuel or diesel subsidy reform to be distributed to the poor and spent on improving social services. Half of the respondents in Jordan preferred the savings to be distributed only to poor families. More than 20 percent of Jordanians who initially opposed the idea of any subsidy reform would support fuel subsidy reform if the savings were to be distributed to the poor, alone or combined with education and healthcare spending.

> 7 A similar situation occured during energy subsidy reform episodes in many other countries (see IMF 2013). As in those cases, mitigating measures were considered as part of the reform in an attempt to generate public support for the reform and offset adverse effects on the poor. In November 2012, a few months after the Jordan Gives experiment, the petroleum subsidy was removed and an unconditional cash transfer was created to compensate the poor and vulnerable. To ensure transparent administration

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