Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/210901 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IFN Working Paper No. 1260
Publisher: 
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Stockholm
Abstract: 
We study how attitudes to inheritance taxation are influenced by information about the role of inherited wealth in society. Using a randomized experiment in a register-linked Swedish survey, we find that informing individuals about the large aggregate importance of inherited wealth and its link to inequality of opportunity significantly increases the support for inheritance taxation. The effect is almost uniform across socio-economic groups and survives a battery of robustness tests. Changes in the perceived economic importance of inherited wealth and altered views on whether luck matters most for economic success appear to be the main driving factors behind the treatment effect. Our findings suggest that the low salience of inherited wealth could be one explanation behind the relatively marginalized role of inheritance taxation in developed economies.
Subjects: 
Capital taxation
Tax attitudes
Equality of opportunity
Randomized experiment
JEL: 
D31
H20
H31
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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