Salience of Inherited Wealth and the Support for Inheritance Taxation

Spencer Bastani and Daniel Waldenström

No 1260, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: We study how attitudes to inheritance taxation are influenced by information about the role of inherited wealth in society. Using a randomized experiment in a register-linked Swedish survey, we find that informing individuals about the large aggregate importance of inherited wealth and its link to inequality of opportunity significantly increases the support for inheritance taxation. The effect is almost uniform across socio-economic groups and survives a battery of robustness tests. Changes in the perceived economic importance of inherited wealth and altered views on whether luck matters most for economic success appear to be the main driving factors behind the treatment effect. Our findings suggest that the low salience of inherited wealth could be one explanation behind the relatively marginalized role of inheritance taxation in developed economies.

Keywords: Capital taxation; Tax attitudes; Equality of opportunity; Randomized experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 H20 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2019-01-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Salience of Inherited Wealth and the Support for Inheritance Taxation (2019)
Working Paper: Salience of Inherited Wealth and the Support for Inheritance Taxation (2019)
Working Paper: Salience of Inherited Wealth and the Support for Inheritance Taxation (2019)
Working Paper: Salience of Inherited Wealth and the Support for Inheritance Taxation (2019)
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