Download or read book Estate and Gift Taxes and Incentives for Inter Vivos Giving in the United States written by James M. Poterba and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper describes the current estate and gift tax rules that apply to intergenerational transfers in the United States. It summarizes the incentives for inter vivos giving as a strategy for reducing estate tax liability. It shows that the current level of intergenerational transfers is much lower than the level that would be implied by simple models of dynastic utility maximization. Moreover, it demonstrates that even among elderly households with net worth in excess of $2.5 million, roughly four times the net worth at which the estate tax takes effect, only about forty-five percent take advantage of the opportunity for tax-free inter vivos giving. Cross-sectional regressions using the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances suggest that transfers rise with household net worth, possibly reflecting the impact of progressive estate taxes. In addition, households with a preponderance of their net worth in illiquid forms, such as a private business, are less likely to make transfers than their equally wealthy counterparts with more liquid wealth. Households with substantial unrealized capital gains, for whom the benefits of capital asset basis step-up at death are greatest, are less likely to make large inter vivos transfers than similarly wealthy households with higher basis assets. Nevertheless, the aggregate flow of intergenerational transfers is much smaller than the level that would result if all households that were likely to face the estate tax attempted to transfer resources through inter vivos gifts

Download or read book Estate and Gift Tax Incentives and Inter Vivos Giving written by David Joulfaian and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The estate tax has received a great deal of attention from policy makers and the public in recent years. Yet we know little about its effect on the transfer of wealth. In this paper we explore the effect of the tax on inter vivos giving. In particular, we look at the degree to which wealthy individuals exploit the potential for tax-free transfers as a means of spending-down their estates, and examine the responsiveness of inter vivos transfers over time to changes in the tax law. To address these questions we employ two data sets, each with important strengths and weaknesses. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we find that many of the wealthy fail to take advantage of the gift tax annual exemption to make tax-free transfers in any given year. Even those that do make a transfer in one year, often do not repeat the transfer annually and transfer far less than the tax law would allow. We then use data from linked gift and estate tax returns to examine giving over a much longer period. We find in the aggregate that there are sizable shifts in the timing of giving in response to tax changes, but again, the wealthy appear to transfer very little during their lifetimes. Overall, we conclude that while taxes are an important consideration in transfer behavior of the rich, their behavior is not universally consistent with a tax minimization strategy.

Download or read book Federal Estate and Gift Taxes written by United States. Department of the Treasury. Advisory Committee on Estate and Gift Taxation and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Estate and gift taxes written by Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America. Finance Department and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Economics of the Estate Tax written by United States. Congress. Joint Economic Committee and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Federal Estate and Gift Taxation written by Richard B. Stephens and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 1346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This treatise contains a comprehensive discussion of the estate and gift tax provisions of the IRC. Practical problems of estate and gift tax planning are analyzed in depth. Gift tax deductions and credits against estate taxes are examined in the work.

Download or read book Gift Taxation in the United States written by Clement Lowell Harriss and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Interrelated Computations for Estate and Gift Taxes written by United States. Internal Revenue Service and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Estate and gift tax revision written by United States. Congress. Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Guide to Federal Estate and Gift Taxation written by United States. Internal Revenue Service and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Federal Estate and Gift Taxes written by United States. Dept. of the Treasury Advisory Committee on Estate and Gift Taxation and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Federal Estate and Gift Taxes written by Carl Sumner Shoup and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Federal Gift Tax written by David Joulfaian and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gift tax was first enacted in 1924, repealed in 1926, overhauled and reintroduced in 1932. At its peak in fiscal year 1999, it raised $4.6 billion in revenues, before the recent phased-in tax rate reductions ushered by the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) took effect. It is noteworthy that the gift tax was first enacted as a protective measure to minimize estate and income tax avoidance, and not for its direct revenue yield. Similarly, EGTRRA, while phasing out the estate tax, retained the gift tax for the very same reasons. Unlike the estate tax which faces an uncertain future, the gift tax is little affected by recent legislative proposals and will remain part of the tax code for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the gift tax has been the subject of little scrutiny and studies of its economic implications are rare. This paper is an attempt to fill this void. It traces the evolution of the gift tax since its inception, and sketches out the structure of the tax and its complex interactions with the income and estate taxes. The paper also provides an overview of the direct fiscal contribution of the gift tax, and traces the number of taxpayers over time as well as their attributes. It concludes with a discussion of the behavioral effects of the gift tax and a review of the scant literature. These include empirical evidence on the choice between gifts and bequests, timing of gifts, and compliance among others.

Download or read book Rethinking Estate and Gift Taxation written by William G. Gale and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although estate and gift taxes raise a small fraction of federal revenues, they have become sources of increasing political controversy. This book is designed to inform the current policy debate and build a conceptual basis for future scholarship. The book contains eleven original studies of estate and gift taxes, along with discussants' comments. The essays provide background and historical information; analyze the optimal taxation of estates and gifts; examine the effects of the tax on charitable contributions, saving behavior, the distribution and level of wealth, tax avoidance and tax evasion; and explore the effects of alternatives to estate taxation.

Download or read book A Reconsideration of the Federal Estate and Gift Tax Structure written by Merle James Honaker and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Federal Estate Tax written by David Joulfaian and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and accessible account of the U.S. estate tax, examining its history and evolution, structure and inner workings, and economic consequences. Governments have been levying some form of inheritance tax since the ancient Egyptians did so in the seventh century BC. In the United States, the federal government experimented with various forms of inheritance taxes, settling on an estate tax in 1916 and a gift tax in 1932. Despite this long history, there are few empirical studies of the federal estate tax. This book offers the first comprehensive look at U.S. estate and inheritance taxes, examining their history and evolution, structure and inner workings, and economic consequences. Written by David Joulfaian, a veteran economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the book provides accessible accounts of such topics as changes in tax laws, issues of equity, the fiscal contribution of the estate tax, and its behavioral effects. Joulfaian traces the evolution of U.S. inheritance taxes from 1797 to the present, noting that the estate tax rate and base expanded through 1976, then began to decline. He describes the tax itself, explaining that it currently applies to estates and gifts in excess of $11.18 million, and outlines applicable deductions and credits. He sketches a profile of taxpayers and their beneficiaries; surveys the revenues from estate and gift taxes; and discusses the effect of estate taxation on labor decisions, saving and wealth accumulation, charitable giving, life insurance ownership, and other economic activities. Finally, he addresses criticisms of the estate tax and analyzes its shortcomings. Accompanying tables present a wealth of data gathered by Joulfaian in his research and not available elsewhere.

Download or read book Do Estate and Gift Taxes Affect the Timing of Private Transfers written by B. Douglas Bernheim and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposals to alter the estate tax are contentious and have been debated largely in an empirical vacuum. This paper examines time series and cross-sectional variation to identify the effects of gift and estate taxation on the timing of private transfers. The analysis is based on data from the 1989, 1992, 1995, and 1998 waves of the Surveys of Consumer Finances. Legislative activity during this period reduced the tax disadvantage of bequests relative to gifts. Moreover, the magnitude of this reduction differed systematically across identifiable household categories. We find that households experiencing larger declines in the expected tax disadvantages of bequests substantially reduced inter vivos transfers relative to households experiencing small declines in the tax disadvantages of bequests. This implies that the timing of transfers is highly responsive to applicable gift and estate tax rates. These conclusions are based both on simple comparisons of the probability of giving across different time periods and groups, and on empirical specifications that control for a variety of potentially confounding factors, such as systematic changes in the fraction of wealth attributable to unrealized capital gains. The results also provide evidence of a systematic bequest motive for some high-wealth households