Bequests and heterogeneity in retirement wealth
研究了能力代际传递、自愿遗赠动机以及意外和有意遗赠的接收如何影响退休时的财富分布，发现建模自愿遗赠能增加财富分散度并降低退休财富与终生收入的相关性。
Households hold vastly heterogeneous amounts of wealth when they reach retirement, and differences in lifetime earnings explain only part of this variation. This paper studies the role of intergenerational transmission of ability, voluntary bequest motives, and the recipiency of accidental and intended bequests (both in terms of timing and size) in generating wealth dispersion at retirement, in the context of a rich quantitative model. Modeling voluntary bequests, and realistically calibrating them, not only generates more wealth dispersion at retirement and reduces the correlation between retirement wealth and lifetime income, but also generates a skewed bequest distribution that is close to the one in the observed data.