Inherited Wealth and Demographic Aging

Harun Onder and Pierre Pestieau

No 5984, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The role of inherited wealth in modern economies has increasingly become under scrutiny. This study presents one of the first attempts to shed light on how demographic aging could shape this role. We show that, in the absence of retirement annuities, or for a given level of annuitization, both increasing longevity and decreasing fertility should reduce the inherited share of total wealth in a given economy. Thus, aging is not likely to explain a recent surge in this share in some advanced economies. Shrinking retirement annuities, however, could offset and potentially reverse these effects. We also show that aging could increase the size of individual bequests vis-à-vis real wages. However, these bequests will be more unequally distributed if aging is driven by a drop in fertility. In comparison, the effect of increasing longevity on their distribution in non-monotonic.

Keywords: inherited wealth; inheritance; aging; inequality; social security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D31 D64 D91 E21 H55 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Inherited Wealth and Demographic Aging (2016)
Working Paper: Inherited wealth and demographic aging (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5984

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