This paper investigates the role of inheritance in the distribution of wealth in Germany. Recently collected survey data allow us to compute inheritance - wealth ratios for various quantiles based on several assumptions concerning the capitalization of past bequests and gifts. Our results...

Private wealth is a crucial factor for the economic well-being of households. Key determinants of private wealth include intergenerational wealth transfers (gifts and inheritances), which are gaining importance since 1990, as research suggests. We conduct a detailed investigation of the...

We use data from the European Household Finance and Consumption Survey in order to examine the distributional effect of intergenerational wealth transfers on the net worth distribution in 8 European countries and compare it to recent findings for the US. To do so, we resort to the decomposition...