This study investigates how actual and anticipated intergenerational wealth transfers (i.e., inter-vivo gifts and inheritances) contribute to social stratification in the transition to homeownership. Utilizing discrete-time survival analysis on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study...

This paper examines long-term trends in aggregate wealth and inheritance and in their distributions, focusing on developed economies. A key stylized fact is that wealth is less equally distributed than income. Financial assets predominate among the wealthy, while owner-occupied housing is...

Welfare States do not insure citizens against the risk of premature death, i.e., the risk of having a short life. Using a dynamic OLG model with risky lifetime, this paper compares two insurance devices reducing well-being volatility due to the risk of early death: (i) an ante-mortem age-based...

Despite its relevance in 19th-century economics, wealth -its accumulation, composition, and distribution- has largely been neglected in Italian economic history. Filling this gap, we show that between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, Italy presented a historically high value of total...

Die zunehmende Vermögensungleichheit wird sowohl in aktuellen politischen Debatten als auch in den Sozialwissenschaften diskutiert. Trotz des breiten Interesses an der Vermögenskonzentration wissen wir bislang jedoch nur wenig über die größten Privatvermögen. Daher untersuchen wir die...

This paper examines how expecting to receive an inheritance impacts household savings decisions. Life-cycle consumption models indicate that the expectation of inheriting should reduce current savings plans for forward-thinking consumers. We investigate how inheritance expectations shape savings...