Salience of Inherited Wealth and the Support for Inheritance Taxation

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 7482

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions ; Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue: General ; Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: Household
• Subject: capital taxation ; tax attitudes ; equality of opportunity ; randomized experiment

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Bastani, Spencer ; Waldenström, Daniel
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2019

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/198842
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET