Thursday, July 29, 2010

Did modern growth kill inheritances?

There is a literature that tries to understand bequests, in particular whether they are accidental or voluntary. This is an important question as it has strong implications on savings motives, and thus on aggregate savings. With the development and sophistication of financial markets, one should see the accidental bequest to become less important. People can insure themselves against uncertain life times with annuities and life insurance, thus reducing the need to have excess savings in the case of unexpectedly long life. Voluntary bequests may go either way with development, depending on whether parents prefer to make inter-vivos transfers, which they can afford given the above.

Now all this is put into question after a great data digging initiative byThomas Piketty, who compiled bequest data for France from 1850 to 2008. He notices that while the size of bequests has decreased until the 1950s, this trend is now reversed. Concretely, as a fraction of national income, bequests amounted to 25% in the late 1800s, 5% in 1950 and 15% nowadays. Piketty measures this in two ways, once using wealth data and mortality tables, and once using actual bequests as recorded by fiscal authorities. The second measure is somewhat lower, as expected, but shows the same pattern through time.

The important question is now, what is the new incentive that would make households to leave larger bequests now (and even more in the future, as Piketty suggests)? The old argument of the new growth regime that came with Industrialization is clearly not valid. Piketty proposes that the difference between the rate of return and the growth rate mostly drives the aggregate size of inheritances. But there surely are also important microeconomic aspects, like the wealth distribution, borrowing constraints, the correlation of income between generations and subtleties of the tax code.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

EL wrote ''But there surely are also important microeconomic aspects, like the wealth distribution, borrowing constraints, the correlation of income between generations and subtleties of the tax code.''

How do you think you can do better than Piketty? you suggest some avenues but nothing really precise. Show us, please... Teach us something once. Only once would be enough to me.

Anonymous said...

I agree with you. EL is getting tired. His/her comments are rather unfocused. But your comments are not very focused neither, a I should say.

Anyway, the paper discussed here is very good from my point of view. We can argue that it can be improved in several ways and several issues deserve to be discussed. But isn't it our job?

On the other hand, I have never seen any paper from EL, yet. Is there any forthcoming?

Vilfredo said...

I am glad EL pointed out a good paper, that is valuable. But EL is commenting on a different paper almost every day, in very different fields. You need so serious stamina to sustain that over several years. One should not expect EL to improve on each paper...

That said, I think EL asks good questions here, and maybe someone has answers, or someone will be motivated to study this.