Replication Data for The Wrong Winners: Anti-Corporate Animus and Attitudes Towards Trade

Globalization creates winners and losers, and recent research emphasizes that large
corporations are among the biggest beneficiaries from trade while smaller firms may be
harmed. How do these redistributive effects impact trade attitudes? Because a growing
share of Americans hold highly unfavorable views of big corporations, we argue that
the belief that large firms win from trade will provoke hostility towards trade and
globalization. To test this theory, we show experimentally that informing people that
large corporations benefit from trade makes them markedly more hostile towards trade
compared to a treatment emphasizing that firms in exporting industries benefit. Using
subgroup and mediation analysis, we find that anti-corporate sentiment, particularly
concern about corporations’ power in society, drives this effect. Our findings illustrate
how distributive consequences and attitudes towards the winners and losers from policy
change interact to shape public opinion on economic policy.