Estate Taxes and Charitable Bequests by the Wealthy

David Joulfaian (david.joulfaian@treasury.gov)

No 7663, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Charitable bequests are an important source of philanthropic support. Unlike bequests to children which can be taxed at a maximum statutory rate of 0.55, such transfers are exempt from estate taxation. Thus, by lowering the price of charitable giving, the estate tax may influence the disposition of terminal wealth. In this paper, I examine the effects of estate taxation on charitable bequests using data from estate tax returns of decedents in 1992. The results suggest that the estate tax deduction is budget' efficient. The overall effects of the estate tax, however, are likely to be modest as charitable bequests are wealth elastic.

JEL-codes: D19 H24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pub
Note: PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Published as Joulfaian, David. "Estate Taxes And Charitable Bequests By The Wealthy," National Tax Journal, 2000, v53(3,Sep), Part 2, 743-763.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7663.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Estate Taxes and Charitable Bequests by the Wealthy (2000)
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:7663

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7663

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 (wpc@nber.org).