Arbeitspapier

Salience of inherited wealth and the support for inheritance taxation

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.

Sprache
Englisch

Erschienen in
Series: IFN Working Paper ; No. 1260

Klassifikation
Wirtschaft
Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue: General
Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: Household
Thema
Capital taxation
Tax attitudes
Equality of opportunity
Randomized experiment

Ereignis
Geistige Schöpfung
(wer)
Bastani, Spencer
Waldenström, Daniel
Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wer)
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)
(wo)
Stockholm
(wann)
2019

Handle
Letzte Aktualisierung
10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ

Datenpartner

Dieses Objekt wird bereitgestellt von:
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.

Objekttyp

  • Arbeitspapier

Beteiligte

  • Bastani, Spencer
  • Waldenström, Daniel
  • Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)

Entstanden

  • 2019

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