Program > Papers by author > Zuber Stéphane

Premature deaths, accidental bequests and fairness
Marc Fleurbaey  1@  , Marie Louise Leroux  2@  , Pierre Pestieau  3@  , Gregory Ponthiere  4@  , Stéphane Zuber  5@  
1 : Princeton University  -  Website
Princeton, NJ 08544 USA -  United States
2 : Université du Québec à Montréal  (UQAM)  -  Website
Université du Québec à Montréal CP 8888, succursale Centre-ville Montréal (Québec) H3C 3P8 -  Canada
3 : Université de Liège  -  Website
Place du 20-Août, 7 4000 Liège -  Belgium
4 : University Paris 12 and PSE
Université Paris XII - Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne (UPEC)
5 : Paris School of Economics  (PSE)  -  Website
Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, Université Paris1-Panthéon-Sorbonne
48 boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris -  France

While little agreement exists regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subject to a con…fiscatory tax. We propose to reexamine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests in an economy where individuals care about what they leave to their offspring in case of premature death. We show that, whereas the conventional 100 % tax view holds under the standard utilitarian social welfare criterion, it does not hold under the ex post egalitarian criterion, which assigns a strong weight to the welfare of unlucky short-lived individuals. From an egalitarian perspective, it is optimal not to tax, but to subsidize accidental bequests. We examine the robustness of those results in a dynamic OLG model of wealth accumulation, and show that, whereas the sign of the optimal tax on accidental bequests depends on the form of the joy of giving motive, it remains true that the 100 % tax view does not hold under the ex post egalitarian criterion.


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