EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Primogeniture, Equal Sharing, and the U.S. Distribution of Wealth

Paul L. Menchik

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1980, vol. 94, issue 2, 299-316

Abstract: Bequest patterns to children are important in intergenerational models of the distribution of income and wealth. Economies that feature primogeniture will have a greater degree of inequality than those featuring equal division. This paper presents evidence on estate division among children by sex, birth order, family size, estate size, and asset composition. The results presented here are preference-generated not tax-induced due to the tax characteristics within the sampling region. It is shown that equal sharing among children is the rule, a result that casts doubt upon the "altruist" model of inheritance as advanced by Becker and Tomes.

Date: 1980
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (112)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/1884542 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:94:y:1980:i:2:p:299-316.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:94:y:1980:i:2:p:299-316.