Steady state levels of population and per capita income are examined using a Becker-Barro (1988) style of model of an economy with identical altruistic parents bearing costly children who receive bequests of capital and land. Inspired by the work of North (1981) and others, the problem of open...

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...

The research on private financial transfers between generations lacks a longitudinal perspective. Gifts as intergenerational transfers inter vivos allow us to study the importance of life course events for the chances of receiving transfers. In Germany, gifts are highly private and leave more...

This paper studies how income and bequest taxes affect income inequality. We firstly explore this relationship empirically using a panel of 20 OECD countries from 1980 to 2008. The data shows that an increase of income taxation tends to strengthen income inequality, while the inequality effect...

Although rational consumers without bequest motives are better off investing exclusively with annuitized instruments in partial equilibrium, we demonstrate the welfare effect of annuitization is ambiguous in general equilibrium on account of pecuniary externalities. Absent institutional...

Parents care about their children, spend resources on educating them and bequeath them some physical and/or human capital. Here we argue that the actions of the parents have an influence, not only on the productive possiblities open to the children (through the captital they inherit) but also on...

Even though smokers incur higher health expenditures than nonsmokers of the same age, smokers have significantly higher mortality rates, so the expected lifetime health expenditure for a smoker is actually lower than for a nonsmoker. Because of this fact, some politicians and policy-makers have...

Luxury bequests impart systematic effects of age to an investor's optimal allocation: the expected percentage allocation to equities rises throughout retirement. When bequests are luxuries the marginal utility of bequests declines more slowly than the marginal utility of consumption. This is...

Some empirical studies firmly reveal that people tend to form overly pessimistic survival expectations for relatively less distant ages and overly optimistic survival expectations for relatively more distant ages. We incorporate this observation into a life-cycle continuous time...