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Here’s a counter study from the DOL “ The main focus of the paper is to examine the effects of inheritances and other wealth transfers on overall wealth inequa

by tarr11 5y ago

Here’s a counter study from the DOL “ The main focus of the paper is to examine the effects of inheritances and other wealth transfers on overall wealth inequality. The results reported below are surprising, unexpected and even counter-intuitive. We find that wealth transfers actually act as a factor that decreases wealth inequality rather than increasing it. Though we do not have hard empirical evidence on whether inheritances inhibit or spur intergenerational wealth mobility, we infer that wealth transfers are likely to raise the degree of wealth mobility across the generations.” https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2011/pdf/ec110030.pdf https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2011/pdf/ec110030.p...

whimsicalism 5y ago
Worth noting that this study is based on a survey where people self-report (by the inheritor) inheritance flows. In countries where this is tracked in parallel with actual estate data, most inherited wealth is not reported on these sorts of surveys. It is also based on patching together different datasets from different authors. Estimates using non-self reported data as well as homogenous (rather than pasted) series have found that about 60% of wealth in the US is inherited, likely 50% of that is inherited by the top 5% most affluent households, and that the effect is inequality enhancing. [0] [0]: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/estateshort.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/estateshort.pdf