This symposium paper, originally presented at the September 19, 2008 NYU Tax Law Review Symposium on inheritance taxation, begins to examine what it might mean for the law to protect a "right to use one's resources to benefit one's family." The paper draws on historical debates over inheritance...

A society's values may be discernible in its intestacy laws, the laws which govern the distribution of a decedent’s estate when there is no valid will. Upon examination, unique characteristics among competing intestacy schemes emerge. The most startling characteristic of Chinese inheritance...

This paper explores the effect of discretion in estate valuation techniques on the effective estate tax burden on different asset classes. For some assets, such as liquid securities, there is relatively little discretion in valuation. For other assets, such as partial interests in closely-held...

In this paper we describe a novel source of data on the full record of inheritance tax files in Italy, covering up to 63% of total deceased. The work documents a substantial rise in the total value of inheritance and gifts as a share of national income, from 8.4% in 1995 to 15.1% in 2016....

Beteiligte und ihre zivilrechtliche Position -- Zu übertragende Vermögensgegenstände -- Unentgeltliche Übertragung -- Entgeltliche Übertragung -- Teilentgeltliche Übertragung -- Übertragung zwischen Ehegatten -- Absicherung des Übergebers -- Ansprüche auf Rückabwicklung -- Störung der...

In this chapter, I review empirical and theoretical literature on taxation of intergenerational transfers (estates, bequests, inheritances, inter vivos gifts) and wealth. The main message may be summarized as follows. Empirical evidence on bequest motivations and responses to estate taxation is...

This article previews some of the author's arguments concerning more effective taxation of intergenerational wealth transmission that were later delineated in his award-winning book "Inheritance, Wealth, and Society (Indiana University Press 1982)". The author uses historical and philosophical...

Using a counterfactual approach based on propensity score matching with Rosenbaum bounds in a cross section of 134 countries, we study the causal effect of colonisation on contemporary subjective happiness. Findings reveal that the settled countries, specifically former French colonies,...