Intergenerational Transfers and Inheritance: A Comparative View

his chapter is about material transfers among adult family generations. They occur either as inter vivos gifts or as bequests. These two types have often been analyzed separately despite good reasons to treat them together. The description and explanation of such transfers has been the subject of a broad range of theoretical approaches, including sociological theories of the social antecedents and consequences of transfers, economic theories of the reasons or motives for transfer giving, and sociobiological (neo-Darwinian) theories of why transfers have evolved and where they are directed. Sociological theories directly address variations in social structure, culture, and institutions, while economic and sociobiological theories are more universalist in their aims. But the latter must also deal with the changing social contexts of transfers as sources of specific opportunities or restraints for the expression of universal properties. Thus, problems of comparison arise in all approaches. So far, however, they have not been taken up systematically, due to both a lack of appropriate data and a lack of issue conceptualization. More extensive comparative data will hopefully be available in the near future. Here I want to advance the conceptual discussion, and illustrate it with some examples of empirical comparison. The first part of the chapter discusses the general problems of comparison