The division of parental transfers in Europe

Javier Olivera

Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven

Abstract: In the extensively studied equal division puzzle, one finds very large shares of equal bequests and unequal inter-vivos transfers given to adult children. However, such puzzle is less evident in Europe as we find a higher prevalence of parents giving equal inter-vivos transfers. We argue that altruistic parents are also concerned with norms of equal division. Thus, parents do not fully offset child income inequality. The parents start to give larger transfers to poorer children if the child income inequality becomes unbearable from the parent’s view. We find econometric evidence for this behaviour using microeconomic data of 12 European countries from the two waves of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).

Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-eur
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/315571/1/DPS1120.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: The division of parental transfers in Europe (2012)
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:ete:ceswps:ces11.20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().