Egalitarianism, Inheritance, and Taxation: On Daniel Halliday’s The Inheritance of Wealth

Wealth and Inheritance in the Long Run

This chapter offers an overview of the empirical and theoretical research on the long-run evolution of wealth and inheritance. Wealth–income ratios, inherited wealth, and wealth inequalities were high in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries up until World War I, then sharply dropped during the twentieth century following World War shocks, and have been rising again in the late twentieth and e...

Inheritance And Inequality Of Wealth: A Comment

A Theory of Optimal Inheritance Taxation

This paper derives optimal inheritance tax formulas that capture the key equityefficiency trade-off, are expressed in terms of estimable sufficient statistics, and are robust to the underlying structure of preferences. We consider dynamic stochastic models with general and heterogeneous bequest tastes and labor productivities. We limit ourselves to simple but realistic linear or two-bracket tax...

The coevolution of human fertility and wealth inheritance strategies.

Life history theory concerns the scheduling of births and the level of parental investment in each offspring. In most human societies the inheritance of wealth is an important part of parental investment. Patterns of wealth inheritance and other reproductive decisions, such as family size, would be expected to influence each other. Here I present an adaptive model of human reproductive decision...

Fair Inheritance Taxation in the Presence of Tax Planning

This paper presents an analysis of the extent to which tax planning affects the level of the inheritance tax rate that is perceived to be fair. In a factorial survey conducted in Germany, tax planning was found to increase the fair tax rate by approximately 4 percentage points. The fair tax rate is determined by not only the size of the bequest, the relationship of the heir to the bequeather, a...