The Role of Gift and Estate Transfers in the United States and in Europe

Abstract

Most European countries have legal institutions regarding gifts and bequests that are more constraining than the United States. The purpose of this paper is to see whether those institutional differences generate differences in behavior. The paper focuses on the comparison between the United States and France, and on a number of specific issues: the relative importance of bequest in wealth accumulation, the compensatory role of gifts and bequests, the actual way the estate is divided among heirs, and the relative importance of alternative types of inheritance.