EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The (Un)Importance of Inheritance

Sandra Black, Paul Devereux, Fanny Landaud and Kjell G Salvanes

No 29693, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Transfers from parents—either in the form of gifts or inheritances—have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the capitalized sum of net labor income, government transfers, and gifts and inheritances received over the period) accounted for by capitalized gifts and inheritances. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that gifts and inheritances represent a small share of Total Inflows; this is true across the distribution of Total Inflows, as well as at all levels of net wealth at a point in time. Gifts and inheritances are only an important source of income flows among those who have very wealthy parents. Additionally, gifts and inheritances have very little effect on the distribution of Total Inflows – when we do a counterfactual Total Inflows distribution with zero gifts and inheritances, it is not much different from the actual distribution. Our findings suggest that inheritance taxes may do little to mitigate the extreme wealth inequality in society.

JEL-codes: G51 J01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
Note: LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29693.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The (UN)Importance of Inheritance (2024)
Working Paper: The (Un)Importance of Inheritance (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: The (Un)Importance of Inheritance (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: The (Un)Importance of Inheritance (2022)
Working Paper: The (Un)Importance of Inheritance (2022) Downloads
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:nbr:nberwo:29693

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29693

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29693