This paper examines the long-term effects of inheritance rules on economic development and intergenerational mobility. We exploit a historical natural experiment in pre-revolutionary France, where inheritance customs varied sharply: some regions mandated equal division among heirs, whereas others allowed inheritance favoritism. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design and a rich dataset spanning up to 600 years, we estimate the causal effect of inheritance regimes on long-run economic outcomes. Our analysis relies on detailed genealogical records of over six million individuals born between 1400 and 1900 near the inheritance border. We find that historically egalitarian areas exhibit higher income, lower poverty, and reduced inequality today, even more than two centuries after these rules were abolished. Additionally, we show that the positive effects of equal inheritance on life expectancy already emerged for generations born before the French Revolution.

We provide new evidence on the impact of inheritance receipt in early adulthood on a range of economic outcomes. We use rich administrative data from the Netherlands and an empirical strategy that exploits randomness in the timing of parental and grandparental death. We show that a euro of inheritance leads to an initial increase in wealth of 40¢, which shrinks by half over the following seven years. Half of this initial increase comes from a rise in property assets, which is much more persistent than the increase in other assets. Each euro inherited also leads to a 2¢ fall in annual labour income, with larger falls for younger individuals. There is a small positive effect on business income for recipients with low wealth before inheritance receipt, suggesting that inheritances alleviate credit constraints for some. Our results have important implications for the design of policies such as inheritance and gift taxation.

In this work, I find significant exposure effects of childhood neighborhoods on intergenerational income mobility and on the probability of matriculating from high school. However, these effects disappear when controlling for family fixed effects, suggesting differential selection of families on age at move of the child.

I conclude that the differences between regions are likely to stem from sorting rather than from causal effects of neighborhoods. My results demonstrate that the studies conducted in the United States are not necessarily generalizable to the contexts of different societies such as the Nordic welfare state.

This paper examines the real effects of employment protection measures on firm performance by leveraging a unique feature of German inheritance and gift tax law. Specifically, we exploit the preferential tax treatment granted to gratuitous business transfers, which is contingent on meeting minimum holding periods and payroll sum requirements. To study these effects, we identify firm ownership changes triggered by the death of the owner, utilizing Orbis ownership data and publicly available death records. We merge this data with administrative employment data and employ a stacked difference-in-differences design, exploiting a size-dependent applicability threshold. By comparing firms subject to payroll-sum requirements to those exempted, we isolate the causal impact of these provisions, as both treatment and control group undergo an exogenous succession event. Our preliminary findings indicate that the minimum-employment requirements significantly reduce employment growth, with affected firms experiencing up to 20\% slower growth relative to the control group.