BEQUEST AND MORAL HAZARD IN FAMILY

Insook Lee ()
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Insook Lee: Peking University HSBC Business School, University Town, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, P. R. China

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2020, vol. 65, issue 02, 533-550

Abstract: Observed bequest patterns of widely diverse societies are polarized into unigeniture (giving all to one child) and equigeniture (dividing bequests equally). Over time, inheritance custom evolves from unigeniture to equigeniture. To explain these two observations, this paper proposes a model of bequest behavior that a parent cares welfare of his children while he wants them to expend costly and unverifiable efforts for family. All the stable equilibrium inheritance customs comprise unigeniture and equigeniture only, being consistent with the observed polarization. Moreover, a rise in the productivity of efforts for family can cause the evolution to equigeniture from unigeniture.

Keywords: Unigeniture; equigeniture; bequest motive (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1142/S0217590819500127

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