The Role of Bequests in Shaping Wealth Inequality: Evidence from Danish Wealth Records

Abstract

We thank our discussant at the AEA 2016 meeting Kathleen McGarry as well as numerous seminar and workshop participants for comments and discussion. Financial support from the Economic Policy Research Network (EPRN) and the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF-1329-00046) is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Born with a Silver Spoon? Danish Evidence on Wealth Inequality in Childhood

“…We define the treatment group as those children who lose the last remaining grandparent in either maternal or paternal branch in 2007, with the rest of the sample in the control group. This approach is motivated by the fact that bequests in Denmark normally only occur when both individuals in a couple are dead (Boserup et al ., ). At the event time, children are 7–15 years old.…”

“…In order to also obtain a casual estimate of the role of bequests, we follow the event analysis approach in Boserup et al . () and study the development of child wealth around the death of grandparents. The result is displayed in panel ( b ).…”

“…Our study is also related to a large literature on intergenerational wealth transfers, surveyed by, for example, Kopczuk (), with recent studies analysing the role of bequest for the formation of wealth inequality across generations (Boserup et al ., ; Elinder et al ., ). By looking at wealth of children, we are indirectly studying the role of wealth transfers, which are the main source of wealth in childhood.…”

Big and 'unprofitable': How 10 per cent of multinational firms do 98 per cent of profit shifting

“…First, we define the deciles by turnover instead of wage bill, which does not impact the results. Second, using the re-weighting procedure by DiNardo et al (1996) and Boserup et al (2016), we match observations based on wage bills and then estimate the model on the matched sample. Again, this does not change the results.…”

Tax-motivated transfer mispricing in South Africa: Direct evidence using transaction data

“…I do a series of robustness checks of these results. First, using the re-weighting procedure by DiNardo et al (1996) and Boserup et al (2016), I match observations based on transaction size and then estimate the model on the matched sample. This does not change the results (see Appendix Table A2c).…”