Gifts, Bequests, and Social Inequality in West Germany

We compare large inter vivos transfers to bequests using retrospectively surveyed event history data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP). We find the chances of receiving gifts and bequests to depend strongly on the socio-economic position of the parents and on the number of siblings. The same is true for the amount of bequests, but not for the amount of gifts. For women, both the chances of receiving a gift and the amounts transferred are considerably lower than for men. Bequests, on the other hand, are distributed equally between sons and daughters.