, bequests, inheritances, inter vivos gifts) and wealth. The main message may be summarized as follows. Empirical evidence on … direction of (1) mixed motives (2) heterogeneity of preferences and (3) importance of retaining control over wealth. These … focus on understanding implications of inequality of inherited wealth: the topic that has been neglected in the past, even …

Using Danish administrative data, we estimate the impact of bequests on the level and inequality of wealth. We employ … an event study design where we follow the distribution of wealth over time of people who are 45-50 years old, and divide … the average post-bequest wealth 1-3 years after parental death and significantly affect wealth throughout the distribution …

I discuss available evidence about the evolution of top wealth shares in the United States over the last one hundred … increase in wealth concentration and the other two methods showing at best a small increase. I discuss strengths and weaknesses … incomes and the increased importance of self-made wealth may explain difficulties in implementing each of the methods and …

This paper presents new homogeneous series on top wealth shares from 1916 to 2000 in the United States using estate tax … return data. Top wealth shares were very high at the beginning of the period but have been hit sharply by the Great … wealth shares recovered in the early 1980s, but they are still much lower in 2000 than in the early decades of the century …