In the United States, more than two-thirds of decedents with multichild families divide their estates exactly equally among their children. In contrast, intra vivos gifts are usually unequal. These findings challenge the validity of existing theories regarding the determination of...

Whether and how estates and gifts should be taxed has long been a controversial subject, and the approach to estate and gift taxation varies among developed countries. Arguments for and against various forms of transfer taxation have focused on concerns about the distribution of income and...

Does Social Security redistribute across cohorts? Or is it a program for purchasing the jobs' of the elderly? I formalize both models, showing how they have some predictions in common the most important of which is that generational accounts have the appearance of a pyramid scheme.' I also...

Some of the important implications of the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility have been derived under the assumption that parental income is the main source of heterogeneity. We explicitly model the variability and inheritability of innate' earnings ability and the...

In this paper, we examine the empirical implications of reputation formation using a game-theoretic model of intra-familial interactions. We consider parental reputation in repeated two-stage games in which daughters' decision to have a child as a teenager and the willingness of parents to...

Tightly knit extended families, in which people often give money to and get money from relatives, characterize many developing countries. These intra-family flows mean that public policies may affect a very different group of people than the one they target. To assess the empirical importance of...

Each year parents transfer a great deal of money to their adult children. While intuition might suggest that these transfers are altruistic and made out of concern for the well-being of the children, the fundamental prediction of the altruistic model has been decisively rejected in empirical...

This paper develops a theory of intergenerational exchange for generations that are either selfish or have non-dynastic altruism. The main building blocks of the theory are forward and backward intergenerational goods (FIGs and BIGs) and the relationship between them. A FIG is a transfer from...

This paper considers the optimal tax treatment of voluntary transfers to individuals in a" framework that integrates redistributive income taxation and estate and gift taxation. Under this" formulation, redistributive considerations become secondary. The optimal tax treatment of" transfers...

This essay reviews the theory and empirics of intergenerational mobility. Our review draws on models and empirical analyses of classic and more recent work from both economics and sociology. We summarize models and the surrounding empirical evidence of two key sets of mechanisms: family factors...