Federal estate tax returns are a rich source of information on the assets and liabilities associated with decedents, as well as data on beneficiaries of estates. When linked with income tax data for the decedents and their beneficiaries, the resulting data base provides a unique opportunity to study a variety of important economic issues relating to the transfer of wealth and the accumulation o...

The system of distributing financial aid dollars using needs analysis formulae implicitly imposes a financial aid tax on assets. Existing studies provide mixed evidence of the influence of this implicit tax on assets on wealth accumulation. This paper attempts to contribute to the literature on this topic by examining the sensitivity of results to various assumptions, specifications, and catego...

This paper studies the design of the tax and regulatory regime applied to bequests. Bequests are observable, while parent’s wealth and children’s earning abilities are not. Parents know their children’s earning abilities. Parents are altruistic; their utility depends on their children’s utilities, but weights may differ between children. The optimal tax schedule strikes a balance between the (o...

This paper studies the incidence of tax-transfer policy in a growth model wherein individuals differ according to their level of intergenerational altruism and have an endogenous labor supply. The main results is that public debt is neutral at the macro level but redistributes resources from nonaltruists to altruists. Capital income taxation can hurt the nonaltruists who do not have any wealth ...

Working papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded offi cial Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views stated herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Ban...

This paper describes an agent-based minimal economic model currently under development by UCF Complex Adaptive Systems Lab. Standard results using this model are observed and discussed. The model is modified to compare standard results against a tax and spend scheme. We find that taxation and wealth redistribution has significant effect on carrying capacity of the simulation and distribution of...

In Spain there is a historical lack of data about the distribution of wealth. For that reason, the use of tax data offers the opportunity to analyse the distribution of wealth over the 1983-2001 period. We concentrate on top 1% of taxpayers. The results suggest their share increases, mainly due to an increase in the concentration of equity shares, as in general housing evolution reduces concent...