Article: Bequest Division: The Roles of Parental Motives and Children’s Gender Composition
Warn N. Lekfuangfu (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; CEP, London School of Economics; University College London – CReAM – Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration), Javier Olivera (National Bank of Belgium) and Philippe Van Kerm (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research) recently published, Bequest Division: The Roles of Parental Motives and Children’s Gender Composition, 2026.
We examine whether unequal bequest divisions reflect gender bias in parents’ motives, that is, unequal perceptions of deservingness between daughters and sons. First, we conduct a vignette experiment in which an hypothetical parent allocates bequests under different motive scenarios between two children of randomised gender-deservingness configurations. Bequests are most unequally divided under the exchange motive. Across scenarios, respondents systematically favour daughters – rewarding deserving daughters more than equivalent sons. The highest bequest is assigned to a deserving daughter with a brother. These results highlight how gendered notions of deservingness shape bequest motives. Complementing this experimental evidence, analyses of the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe confirm that the gender composition of children alters the role of bequest motives in shaping actual divisions of estates, providing external validation of the vignette findings.