Gifts, Lies and Bequests

Recent empirical work on intergenerational transfers has shown that: i) parents prefer to transfer resources to their children using bequests rather than inter vivos transfers (gifts), and ii) bequests tend to be divided equally, while gifts tend to be directed towards the less well-off children. In this note, we present a theoretical model of the altruistic family with heterogeneous children which does not contradict either i) or ii). In our setting, i) follows because bequests are more e¢cient than gifts: these are negatively related to the children’s reported income (true income cannot be observed) and therefore distort the effort supply decisions as well as inducing underreporting. As for ii), we propose two arguments. First, market imperfections make bequests, which come late in life, a rather ineffective redistributive tool, so that it may be pointless to differentiate them. Second, imposing the constraint that bequest have to be equal is not necessarily costly in welfare terms and permits to avoid the the psychic costs or the loss of reputation associated with unequal giving.