If Sweden becomes member of the European currency union, the conditions for fiscal policy will change. The stabilization policy objectives will, however, hardly change with a membership. At the same time it is not clear if the need for stabilizing the Swedish economy will increase or decrease....

There are large variations in tax design across countries. The lack of convergence suggests that there is room for national tax policies. When designing a tax system the objectives of equity, efficiency, and stabilization have to be balanced against each other. In Sweden, there is a need for...

The objective of this paper is to study when and how much labor supply and savings of heirs respond to inheritances. We estimate fixed effects models following direct heirs, inheriting in 2004, during the years 2000-2008 using Swedish panel data. Our first main result is that the more the heir...

The objective of this essay is to study to what extent parents divide their estates unequally between their children and the determinants of this decision. We use a new dataset based on the estate reports for almost 70,000 Swedish widows, widowers, divorcees and unmarried individuals who died...

Inherited wealth has attracted much attention recently, much due to the research by Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2011; 2014). The discussion has mainly revolved around a long-run contrast between Europe and the U.S., even though data on explicit historical inheritance flows are only really available for...

We study tax-driven intergenerational asset shifting using a salient tax discontinuity and rich data on both donors and recipients. When the Swedish inheritance tax was in place, heirs could lower their inheritance tax bills by passing on part of the inheritance to their children. We present...