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.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY in its series CHILD Working Papers with number
wp01_00.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D10 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - General J10 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - General
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Bernheim, B Douglas & Shleifer, Andrei & Summers, Lawrence H, 1985.
"The Strategic Bequest Motive,"
Journal of Political Economy,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 93(6), pages 1045-76, December.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Bernheim, B Douglas & Shleifer, Andrei & Summers, Lawrence H, 1986.
"The Strategic Bequest Motive,"
Journal of Labor Economics,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 4(3), pages S151-82, July.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)