Tax avoidance and intra-family transfers

We study how taxes on intra-family transfers (bequests and gifts) affect parents' transfers to their children. Our focus is on the incentives for tax avoidance. These issues are important for families and their welfare, as well as for governments and their possibilities of raising revenue from transfer taxes. Using a theoretical model, we show how altruistic parents avoid taxes by changing the timing of transfers when inter vivos gifts are taxed separately from bequests (which is the case in many developed countries). The excess burden per tax dollar of the transfer taxes is sometimes infinitely large because of tax avoidance. All tax avoidance is eliminated if bequests and gifts from the same donor are jointly taxed.