We investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (partition vs. primogeniture)....

Research on leadership in economics has developed in parallel to the literature in management and psychology and links between the fields have been sparse. Whereas modern leadership scholars mostly focus on transformational and related leadership styles, economists have mainly emphasized the...

It is well known that homeowners are richer than renters, even after controlling for observable characteristics. This is often used as an argument for policies that foster homeownership. However, the causal link between homeownership and wealth is difficult to establish due to many potential...

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...

Purchasing life insurance is for the welfare of young children, par-ticularly preteens, who are liquidity constrained. In this paper, we present a life cycle model of life insurance that takes into account the ages of these young beneciaries. We show that, as the child ages, the need for...

The Carnegie effect (Holtz-Eakin, Joualfaian and Rosen, 1993) refers to the idea that inherited wealth harms recipients' work efforts, and possesses a key role in the discussion of taxation of intergenerational transfers. However, Carnegie effect estimates are few, reflecting that such effects...

While little agreement exists regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subject to a confiscatory tax. We propose to reexamine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests in an economy where individuals care about what they...

The taxation of bequests can have a positive impact on the labor supply of heirs through wealth effects. This leads to an increase in future labor income tax revenue on top of direct bequest tax revenue. We first show in a theoretical model that a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, based...

We study how attitudes to inheritance taxation are influenced by information about the role of inherited wealth in society. Using a randomized experiment in a register-linked Swedish survey, we find that informing individuals about the large aggregate importance of inherited wealth and its link...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we make two contributions to the literature on end-of-life transfers. First, we show that unequal bequests are much more common than generally recognized, with one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among...