Bequests and Heterogeneity in Retirement Wealth

Mariacristina De Nardi and Fang Yang

No 20058, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Households hold vastly heterogenous amounts of wealth when they reach retirement, and differences in lifetime earnings explain only part of this variation. This paper studies the role of intergenerational transmission of ability, voluntary bequest motives, and the recipiency of accidental and intended bequests (both in terms of timing and size), in generating wealth dispersion at retirement, in the context of a rich quantitative model. Modeling voluntary bequests, and realistically calibrating them, not only generates more wealth dispersion at retirement and reduces the correlation between retirement wealth and lifetime income, but also generates a skewed bequest distribution that is close to the one in the observed data.

JEL-codes: E21 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-dge and nep-mac
Note: EFG PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

Published as De Nardi, Mariacristina & Yang, Fang, 2014. "Bequests and heterogeneity in retirement wealth," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 182-196.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20058.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bequests and heterogeneity in retirement wealth (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20058

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20058

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().