In the presence of imperfect information and uncertainty, altruistic parents might use intergenerational transfers strategically to elicit effort from their children. As a result, gift and bequests are less reactive to the income realizations of the children than the standard altruistic model of...

This paper characterizes the pattern of intergenerational transfers that emerges in an altruistic model of the family when children's effort is explicitly made endogenous and parents have imperfect information on the stochastic income realizations of their children. It is shown that, if parents...