 Thanks for inviting me and hopefully I will also then add some perspective in terms of shifting focus a little bit from the global developing world and to the richer part of the economies that are still under development of course and in this case Sweden and here the question is if we care about wealth then we would also want to care about what happens with wealth when it's passed on to others in and in this paper we look at one particular channel of this passing on namely the inheritance process so looking at many of the countries that we have that we are interested in and also looking at the work that Jim and Tony and co-authors have done we see that wealth is becoming increasingly unequal in most countries of the world and not at the global scale but for the country of interest now Sweden wealth has has become more unevenly distributed and this is one of the one one of the arguments for why we want to look at wealth and why why wealth may be then more and looking at the implications of why wealth has become more unequally distributed we have also looked at the role of inherited wealth in general inheritance as a source of wealth has become more important over the last decades this is both true for Sweden but as to my piggy tea has also shown look he has also looked at the France and some other countries where the flow of inheritance has become at the general level become more important and the question then we pushed in this paper how does this matter for the wealth inequality among the living this question is not new we found this wonderful quote in a book written by economist Wedgewood in England in the late 1920s he says that inheritance perpetuates perpetuates and may intensify inequalities arising originally from other causes the extent of this of its influence on distribution remains an open question which cannot be decided merely by theoretical reasoning but requires in addition something in the nature of a quantitative analysis of the relevant facts and in fact as it turns out this question is still highly valid we still know quite little about the implications of inheritance on the distribution of wealth okay of course working on the Swedish environment we have one key key advantage namely we can use the registered data that also Jim mentioned are often of high quality when you want to look at the distribution of wealth so in particular we will employ a new database on Sweden where we have registered all inheritance is in fact for the entire population over several years in the 2000s and this is simply for tax reasons we have we have had an inheritance tax and the tax authorities have collected all the states and also then in calculated the the inheritance is to each of the heirs and then the correct inheritance tax in this database then we have all descendants and all their heirs family heirs and non family heirs focus in this analysis will be in the early 2000s when the data are at their best and the data that we have are not only then from the source of the deceased namely the estate but also we we have data on the heirs and their wealth and the and we can also follow these people over time so we have a panel so we in fact observe what happens to the distribution of wealth among the heirs before they inherited and after they inherited and this is at the heart of our analysis we want to look at the before and after and to compare those who inherited with those who have not yet inherited okay what we find so first of all this is a registered analysis of inheritance that have not been able to have not existed before before people have used states samples collected from one particular town or or a country from different sources or they have used computer simulations which we which are based on on assumptions well well founded mostly but nonetheless none of the previous studies have looked at registered data on inheritance so having just the stylized facts coming out of these data are very important so inheritance are very unequally distributed with that's one of the key aspects I will show you more about this we also find a bit remarkably that inheritances actually reduce the cross-sectional inequality among heirs and I will explain why shortly we look at the role of inheritance taxation there are some institutional aspects of the Swedish case where we you want to look at how the inheritance tax was structured but what we find is that it was not very important on the whole and if anything it seems to have reduced increased the level of inequality and I will explain why shortly as well we do also look at the mobility so how people change position in the wealth distribution after having received the inheritance and we see that mobility increases after as a consequence of the inheritance so as you can see we we have some very specific aspects of inheritance and the role of inheritance but what we claim is that these data are so are advantageous from this point of view that we can actually look at causal effects by comparing treated persons those who inherited inherit with those who are not treated and that is not in have not inherited so really coming down to a very precise causal implication of inheritance in at the heart of that is the focus on cohorts so to understand the idea is that in each year a sectional of the population dies in Sweden around 1% and they receive and they have heirs and all the people who inherit from these deceased will then will then represent the full cross section of heirs in society and given that everybody basically inherits some point of their life maybe they inherit nothing in many cases actually this is the case or very small amounts but everybody have everybody has a parent has a parents and or other relatives who will pass on something and for from that perspective looking at the heirs is actually to look at the population of as a whole and focusing on the point in time when they inherit so the cohorts that we look at are those who inherit and they can be very young children young children or they can be fairly old even very old if they inherit means from their children maybe or their brothers or sisters so the counterfactual is not a world without inheritances so that's one discussion that we have in the paper what would have what would that counterfactual in fact be that we would have a 100% inheritance tax for example and we could think then that there are processes come that come to play in terms of how people accumulate their wealth but in our in our case we have a situation where the counterfactual is when people have not yet inherited rather than they will never inherit so we make very little influence on on on the on the on the so to say the plausible world in our analysis okay coming out of the data and I would suspect that this is a representative picture for many of the developing development developed countries in the world so to the left you have a picture of of the distribution of estates so the balance sheets of those who deceased in in this year I know we have all the courts we have we have three courts 2002 2003 and 2004 and then you would have to the right you have the distribution of inheritance and inheritance here are then defined as the means that the heirs get which of course are are relatively you know they map on to the estates but then at this at the estate level you have only the distribution among the deceased but as you can see these distributions are very skewed we have you have genie coefficients around point eight and you see there's big mass points around zero where most people most people live without anything and then you have this fat this tail going up to the right recall now that in many of the standard approaches in economics for example the well-known lifecycle models of Modigliani Brunberg and others they actually claim that people should have lumped being been totally lumped around zero namely that they should not leave anything after after themselves when when they die because this is being consumed away as retired but as we see we have in fact a lot of positive inheritances and positive estates in Sweden at this time you can also see that the heirs are on average 55 years which is then also something which is fairly intuitive that people die in their early 80s in Sweden and their children most of the times are in their 50s okay looking then at the graphic analysis this is one way to show the very intuitive way to show what is the effect of the inheritance on the distribution of wealth so here we have a picture of the cohort 2002 so those inheriting in 2002 and the distribution of their personal wealth in 2001 and 2003 so we can see that the the densities are fairly similar but there are some differences we have a somewhat factor tail in the solid line in 2003 three than we have and we have a smaller share of people being with no net wealth in 2003 then in 2001 we could then from this say that okay there is a shift but this shift could come about for many reasons maybe you know the there are calendar year reasons so we can have business cycle effects on people's wealth of course let's compare the same years but with another cohort the cohort 2004 and this is than people who would who will inherit but not yet have inherited so for them there is see there seems to be a small small differences difference over time but it's much smaller than it is for those who inherit and we can when we look at the the differences in density it's it's clearer that we have here the the cohort 2002 they have a larger decrease of density around with people with no wealth as when they inherit as compared to those in 2004 who have not yet inherited then we also can see whether maybe this is just a general pattern and then we can compare this to a period two years earlier when none of these cohorts have inherited neither the 2002 court or the 2004 court and here as you can see the patterns are very similar for both cohorts as compared to the previous case so this is an indication that something is happening and in fact it's actually captures that the act that the full distribution effect although just in graphs the next step is then to see what happens when we look at some some collect usually normal standard collection of inequality measures so the genie coefficients is obviously the most well-known of those there are some questions about using the genie when you have a lot of zeros and even negative wealth we we we claim that it's possible what we in we also look at coefficient of variation we look at percentile ratios we look at top shares in our analysis I will here only look at the genie coefficients in the interest of time so this is what it looks like so this is the genie coefficient of personal wealth among heirs heirs who have not yet inherited and heirs who are inheriting and afterwards after they have inherited between the years 1999 and 2007 so the picture shows a downward trend of inequality of wealth in this in this group of heirs this downward trend could be explained but a lot of things but typically people are accumulating wealth so there are many lifecycle effects of these particular individuals you see a fairly long large jump downwards in the first year this is the year of the dot-com bubble burst when a lot of high-tech stocks became useless worthless for men of the rich so you would have people losing out disproportionately in the top end of the distribution and that's the genie getting fairly much lower and but what is striking here is that the cohorts in that would be inheriting in 2002 three and four follow very much the same pattern in between 1999 and 2001 and they would actually look following pretty much the same pattern both in trend but also in level in the years after they have inherited in 2005 six and seven but looking at the years when they inherit so we see fairly striking patterns namely that this down the this lower line with the circles this is a 2002 court those who actually inherit after 2001 and during in 2002 you can see the genie decrease much more for them than for the other course who would not have inherited yet looking then at the next year you would see that the 2003 court in squares take this jump down whereas the 2004 cohort who has not still not received inheritors inheritance remains at the same level going one year further you would see that the 2004 cohort when they inherit they experience the decrease in genie coefficient whereas the two and three court does not the reason is that the reason for why have we have a decrease over two years is that for for heirs with parents who die in the end of the year it takes some time until the the the the capital actually gets transferred to their personal accounts so you would have this effect dispersed over two years for for airs those who have who airs with parents who died during 2002 because with late dire late in the year diaries the money would not come until the year after but the effect then is still very consistent so the full effect on the genie would be over these two on the 2002 court would be over these two years and then what we estimate is then compared to the other cohorts over over these two years and then come controlling for the fact that the others are then also inheriting at some point in time but I think this picture gives you a very concise view of the causal effect on the on the cross-sectional wealth distribution of the airs upon inheriting but why then do we see this decreasing dispersion of wealth among the airs so this picture gives you the intuition of that it shows you the dispersion of of inheritances over the distribution of of airs across these sides when they are distributed in these sides so the the the triangular line shows you the mean inheritance over the distribution of of airs so what you see here is that the average level of inheritance gets higher the richer the air is before inheriting that that is if you're a rich air you are more likely on average to receive a large inheritance and this is of course you know something which is very intuitive but when we look at the other line we see that the relative importance of the inheritance so this line shows you the size of the inheritance as a share of your pre inheritance wealth it goes the other way it's much higher for people with little wealth before inheriting than for those who do inherit who inherit who have a lot of wealth before inheriting so the relative importance of the inheritance is is larger for relatively poor airs and this captures very much the effect on the genie coefficient oh yeah so looking at the inheritance tax the Swedish tax in in these years was scaled down to be to be relatively small both in levels and also in level of progressivity but we find in fact that the the effect on on on the distribution is that it seems to have contributed so much to an increase in the level of the genie coefficient when we compare we do it in different ways when we compare the post inheritance genie with and without the inheritance tax we can add it back of course this you know there is a distance there is a behavioral effect that that we do not account for but mechanically we see that it seems to increase the level of inequality a little bit of course there are caveats of when it comes to the tax analysis and we are still working on this so draw you know the general conclusions from inheritance taxation could be affected by the fact that the tax was fairly flat in Sweden and this point at this point and and so on so forth there are some points on that but the intuition behind this result is the same namely that we have as we had in the main result we see that the mean inheritance tax paid by the airs is increasing in the size of the pre inheritance wealth of the airs so the airs who are richer before inheriting on average pay more inheritance tax than those who are poorer than in before inheriting but when we look at the the the tax receipt as a share of pre inheritance wealth of the of the airs it's larger for poorer relatively poorer airs and this is this line so we would have the same relative versus absolute differences in in terms of the effect on the on the wealth distribution of airs we also look at the mobility with the people switch places in the distribution so this plot this picture shows you a collection of mobility measures and using basically the same difference in difference analysis as we used in the main in the main exercise and what we see here is that the level of mobility increases upon inheriting for the 2002 cohort and for the 2003 cohort when they inherit and in relative terms for the 2004 cohort where there seems to be a downward trend in all over when it comes in terms of mobility so and this is perhaps not so surprising that people switch places relatively more often when they inherit and but this is just merely establishing that fact using this causal analysis as we claim okay of course there are many more things to say we have a paper which is a working paper on the web on these issues and I you know I was not humble enough to mention that there you know many many of the papers there are out there that have addressed these issues before which there are people here in the audience who have actually contributed a lot to this literature but this is a this is an ongoing question which is of quite some interest so what we then look find using these register data which is our key advantage of this study is that we find this compressionary effect on the wealth distribution of airs upon inheriting but of course in we we we we are still working on this analysis and we look forward to hearing your comments because of course there are issues that you want to think about what about did we did not think about or we have not still not looked at the distribution of the tax received to people so how would that affect the wealth distribution if say all the wealth inheritance taxes or inheritance tax receipts would be distributed to the to the people at the lower end what would what would be would be the counterfactual thought experiment if that if you would tax all inheritance or all inheritances and then redistribute them perhaps progressively of course then that raises another question what would happen to people's willingness to accumulate wealth in the first place anyway there are a lot of issues on this agenda I think this the role of inheritance is inheritance is for for wealth inequality has it's been been been discussed before but it will be discussed more and more over the years and and for reasons that I started out saying namely that wealth inequality is increasing and and the aggregate size of inherited wealth in the economies are is also increasing so we won't think about these questions more and more over the time thank you