While little agreement exists regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subject to a confiscatory tax. We propose to reexamine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests in an economy where individuals care about what they...

Actual inheritances are an hybrid of canonical types of bequests and in particular of accidental bequests and altruistic bequests. In this paper, bequeathed estate consists of two components: an amount intended by altruistic parents and an amount which results from the premature death of...

When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the tax administration should partition the population into two groups: One consisting of people who do not receive an inheritance and the other of those who do. The first tagged...