IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tcd/tcduee/tep1223.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Long and the Short of it: Inheritance and Wealth in Ireland

Author

Listed:
  • Simone Arrigoni

    (Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin)

  • Laura Boyd

    (Central Bank of Ireland)

  • Tara McIndoe-Calder

    (Central Bank of Ireland)

Abstract

Inheritances matter for wealth accumulation and are often central to policy debates on wealth taxes. Using household level survey data, this paper shows that up to 2020 over one-third of households in Ireland had inherited wealth, the cumulative value of which ( 97 billion) accounts for approximately one sixth of current net wealth for these households. However, the impact of inheritance extends beyond its direct value as inheritors tend to be wealthier, with a greater ownership of property. Our analysis shows that inheritances in Ireland contribute little to wealth inequality, and may even have reduced it over time, in line with existing findings for Britain and the United States. Tentative evidence suggests that mechanisms behind this wealth equalising effect may be (i) the importance of inheritances for the acquisition of property assets for middle-wealth households, (ii) the rise of asset prices, especially house prices, and (iii) substitution from employee income to rental income among inheritors.

Suggested Citation

  • Simone Arrigoni & Laura Boyd & Tara McIndoe-Calder, 2023. "The Long and the Short of it: Inheritance and Wealth in Ireland," Trinity Economics Papers tep1223, Trinity College Dublin, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:tcd:tcduee:tep1223
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2023/TEP1223.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    intergenerational transfers; inheritances; wealth inequality; HFCS; Gini;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers

    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:tcd:tcduee:tep1223. 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: Colette Angelov (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/detcdie.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.