New papers from the NBER

“Bequests and Heterogeneity in Retirement Wealth,” by Mariacristina De Nardi, Fang Yang - #20058 (EFG PE)

Abstract:

Households hold vastly heterogenous amounts of wealth when they reach retirement, and differences in lifetime earnings explain only part of this variation. This paper studies the role of intergenerational transmission of ability, voluntary bequest motives, and the recipiency of accidental and intended bequests (both in terms of timing and size), in generating wealth dispersion at retirement, in the context of a rich quantitative model. Modeling voluntary bequests, and realistically calibrating them, not only generates more wealth dispersion at retirement and reduces the correlation between retirement wealth and lifetime income, but also generates a skewed bequest distribution that is close to the one in the observed data.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W20058?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw