2019/06/21 by Spencer Bastani, Daniel Waldenström, Bastani, Spencer +1
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Economic Policies and Impacts
paper · doi:10.57938/e1bbc952-d208-40e6-9475-50b84417e429
We study how attitudes to inheritance taxation are influenced by information <br/>about the role of inherited wealth in society. Using a randomized experiment in <br/>a register-linked Swedish survey, we find that informing individuals about the <br/>large aggregate importance of inherited wealth and its link to inequality of opportunity <br/>significantly increases the support for inheritance taxation. The effect <br/>is almost uniform across socio-economic groups and survives a battery of robustness <br/>tests. Changes in the perceived economic importance of inherited wealth and <br/>altered views on whether luck matters most for economic success appear to be the <br/>main driving factors behind the treatment effect. Our findings suggest that the <br/>low salience of inherited wealth could be one explanation behind the relatively <br/>marginalized role of inheritance taxation in developed economies.