Authors
Marco Francesconi, Robert Pollak, Domenico Tabasso, Graziella Bertocchi
Description
Many governments seek to encourage charitable giving, both in life and upon death, via favourable treatment in the tax code. This column uses new data from the UK to examine how estate size and the inheritance tax threshold influence the decision to make a bequest to charity. The likelihood of including a bequest in a will rises modestly over the bottom half of the estate size distribution, and more rapidly over the upper tail. The results also suggest that the inheritance tax leads to an increase in charitable intent.
Scholar articles