Inherited Wealth and Demographic Aging

Pierre Pestieau and Harun Onder

No 11387, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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 oset and potentially reverse these eects. We also show that aging could increase the size of individual bequests vis-Ã -vis real wages. However, these bequests will be more unequally distributed if aging is driven by a drop in fertility. In comparison, the eect of increasing longevity on their distribution in non-monotonic.

Keywords: Bequest motives; Aging; Inherited wealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11387 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Inherited Wealth and Demographic Aging (2016)
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:cpr:ceprdp:11387

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11387

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().