Most models of family transfers consider only two generations and focus on two motives: altruism and exchange. They also assume perfect substitution between inter vivos financial transfers and bequests to children. On the contrary, this survey of recent developments in the literature emphasizes...

Using French survey data, we explore empirically whether earnings uncertainty and borrowing constraints decrease households demand for risky assets, consistent with theoretical predictions. A major empirical problem is the potential endogeneity bias of income risk, as more risk averse households...

Using the first wave of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), a large micro-level dataset on households? balance sheets in 15 euro area countries, this paper explores how households allocate their assets. We derive stylised facts on asset participation as well as levels...

Of limited revenue and being increasingly unpopular, the taxation of inheritance is often justified by a concern for social justice and redistribution: inequality of opportunity, unearned windfall income, high concentration and intergenerational reproduction of wealth, etc. In a country like...

En France, l'influence des comportements patrimoniaux des parents sur celui de leurs enfants a souvent été mise en évidence. Comment expliquer alors ce "poids d'Anchise" ? Dans cet article, nous utilisons une enquête originale française et unique initiée par le Delta et TNS-Sofres en 2002...

There is a capital taxation puzzle in most developed countries. Since the 1960s, revenues from wealth transfer taxation have been especially low and decreasing as a percentage of GDP, even to the extent of disappearing in quite a number of cases; by contrast, lifetime wealth or capital taxation...

We explore empirically whether earnings uncertainty and borrowing constraints deter households from the stockmarket, consistent with the predictions of theoretical studies of portfolio choice in the presence of uninsurable earnings. Recent extensions highlight the importance of the correlation...

Do couples share the same values? The social sciences have mainly concentrated on comparing the socioeconomic characteristics of spouses, but rarely their preferences to risk and time. In this paper, we use conventional measurements and an original method. We find that spouses are very similar...

Measuring individual preferences of savers have two main motivations: to reduce the share of non-observed heterogeneity in explaining households' wealth behaviors, and to construct more accurate tests of the theories of savings and portfolio choices. For France, we have constructed a unique data...