The last will: Estate divisions as a testament of to whom altruism is directed

Mikael Elinder, Per Engström and Oscar Erixson

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 7, 1-15

Abstract: We use data on estate divisions to study to whom altruistic preferences are directed. Insofar bequests are given without the prospect of future personal benefits in mind, they are presumably intrinsically motivated. Hence, estate divisions provide a rare opportunity to study intrinsically motivated prosocial behavior in the field. The empirical analysis is based on data from digitized estate reports for all individuals in Sweden who passed away in 2002 and 2003. The data show in detail how the decedents distributed their bequests. We find that family members, both genetic (offspring) and non-genetic (partner), receive the lion’s share of the estates. Other relatives, friends and strangers (represented by charities) receive only very small shares of the total estate wealth. The results suggest that intrinsically motivated altruism is primarily directed towards close family members.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254492 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 54492&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0254492

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254492

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().