Will Writing and Bequest Motives: Early 20th Century Irish Evidence

LeslieMcGranahan (Economist – Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago) has published herarticle Will Writingand Bequest Motives: Early 20th Century Irish Evidence on SSRN. 

Here is the abstract:

This paper develops a simple modelof the decision to write a will prior to death and tests the implications ofthe model using data from Ireland prior to the advent of state provided old agesupport. The model assumes that individuals write wills in order to change thedistribution of their assets from the distribution that would occur in theabsence of a will and that individuals incur will writing costs. The modelleads to the predictions that individuals whose desired distribution differsmost dramatically from the default and those who face the lowest costs will bethe most likely to write wills. A data set that matches individual Irish estaterecords from 1901 to 1905 to household records from the 1901 Irish Census isused to test these implications. I find that age, wealth, and landholdinginfluence will writing.