IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvco/2018006.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An age-differentiated tax on bequests

Author

Listed:
  • PESTIEAU Pierre,

    (Université de Liège, CORE and Paris School of Economics)

  • PONTHIERE Gregory,

    (Université Paris 12, Paris School of Economics and Institut universitaire de France)

Abstract

Although fiscal systems around the world tax bequests at rates that do not explicitly depend on the age of the deceased, there exist several theoretical reasons to use that observable characteristic to differentiate the tax rate on bequests. This paper presents four arguments supporting an age-differentiated tax on bequests, that is, a tax rate on bequests that is varying with the age of the deceased. A first argument, which relies on the standard utilitarian criterion, supports a tax rate decreasing with the age of the deceased on the grounds that, as age increases, the accidental (inelastic) component of bequests declines, making taxation less desirable on efficiency grounds. However, three other arguments - avoiding influence of the tax on testamentary dispositions, compensating the unlucky short-lived and redistributing towards orphans in need - all support a tax rate on bequests increasing with the age of the deceased.

Suggested Citation

  • PESTIEAU Pierre, & PONTHIERE Gregory,, 2018. "An age-differentiated tax on bequests," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2018006, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2018006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2018.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marie‐Louise Leroux & Pierre Pestieau, 2022. "Age‐related taxation of bequests in the presence of a dependency risk," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 24(1), pages 92-119, February.
    2. Leroux, Marie-Louise & Pestieau, Pierre, 2021. "Age and health related inheritance taxation," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2021002, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    bequest; taxation; age discrimination; mortality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2018006. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.