Now I'm finding some stuff:
"Israeli Attitudes About Inter Vivos Transfers"
Yuval Elmelech Seymour Spilerman
Economics Working Paper Archive from Levy Economics Institute, The
Abstract: Using data from the 1994-95 Survey of Families in Israel--which includes 1,607 urban Jewish respondents interviewed on topics relating to work behavior, household income, wealth, assistance received from parents and given to children, and views about financial responsibilities between parents and children--the authors examined attitudes in Israel about intergenerational assistance and the effects of these attitudes on transfer decisions by parents. Views about parental obligations are likely not independent of a country's economic and social organization. In a country with an extensive program of public assistance for young adults, for example, there may be less need for private family transfers and less of a sense of parental responsibility for providing support. Similarly, where young couples face severe liquidity constraints or otherwise require substantial resources in order to begin a household, parental feelings of obligation might be heightened. Israel is a country in which the need for parental support is high and the level of parental involvement in the financial lives of young adults is often considerable.
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
Date: 2001-10
Downloads: (external link)
levy.org (application/pdf)
Compensatory inter vivos gifts
Stefan Hochguertel (shochguertel@feweb.vu.nl) and Henry Ohlsson (henry.ohlsson@nek.uu.se)
No 31, Working Papers in Economics from Göteborg University, Department of Economics
Abstract: Empirical studies of intergenerational transfers usually find that bequests are equally divided among heirs while inter vivos gifts tend to be compensatory. Using the 1992 and 1994 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we find that only 4% of parents who give, divide their gifts equally among their children. Estimating probit models, using family panels, we find that gifts are compensatory in the sense that a child is more likely to receive a gift if she works fewer hours and has lower income than than her brothers and sisters. These results carry over to the amounts given. Fixed effects Tobit estimations show that the fewer hours a child works and the lower her income is, the more the parents give. Gifts are compensatory. The empirical results are, therefore, consistent with the predictions of the altruistic model of intergenerational transfers.
Estate and Gift Taxes and Incentives for Inter Vivos Giving in the United States
James Poterba (poterba@mit.edu)
No 6842, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract: This paper describes the current estate and gift tax rules that apply to intergenerational transfers in the United States. It summarizes the incentives for inter vivos giving as a strategy for reducing estate tax liability. It shows that the current level of intergenerational transfers is much lower than the level that would be implied by simple models of dynastic utility maximization. Moreover, it demonstrates that even among elderly households with net worth in excess of $2.5 million, roughly four times the net worth at which the estate tax takes effect, only about forty-five percent take advantage of the opportunity for tax-free inter vivos giving. Cross-sectional regressions using the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances suggest that transfers rise with household net worth, possibly reflecting the impact of progressive estate taxes. In addition, households with a preponderance of their net worth in illiquid forms, such as a private business, are less likely to make transfers than their equally wealthy counterparts with more liquid wealth. Households with substantial unrealized capital gains, for whom the benefits of capital asset basis step-up at death are greatest, are less likely to make large inter vivos transfers than similarly wealthy households with higher basis assets. Nevertheless, the aggregate flow of intergenerational transfers is much smaller than the level that would result if all households that were likely to face the estate tax attempted to transfer resources through inter vivos gifts.
Reforms reducing the generosity of pensions have distributional effects on future
generations if individuals care about their descendants’ welfare, but only affect
elderly individuals if bequests are the unintentional result of precautionary savings.
And safety-net programmes such as unemployment insurance may displace sources
of private help, such as that provided by living parents to their children in need.
This paper provides comparable measures of how expected bequests and transfers
vary with cumulated parental earnings in the United States, West Germany and
the United Kingdom. The strength of bequest motives is empirically very weak in
the available data. Private inter vivos transfers, which appear to depend on the
recipients’ economic situation, are partly crowded out by public unemployment
insurance programmes. Together, involuntary bequests and intentional inter vivos
transfers appear to be an important channel of intergenerational inequality
transmission, and strengthen substantially the relationship between an individual’s
and his parents’ economic status.
— Ernesto Villanueva |
