Bequests as Signals: An Explanation for the Equal Division Puzzle

Abstract

In the United States, more than two‐thirds of decedents with multichild families divide their estates exactly equally among their children. In contrast, gifts given before death are usually unequal. These findings challenge the validity of existing theories regarding the determination of intergenerational transfers. In this paper, we develop a theory that accounts for this puzzle based on the notion that the division of bequests provides a signal about a parent’s altruistic preferences. The theory can also explain the norm of unigeniture, which prevails in other societies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 147 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.