Lobbying,Family Concerns,and the Lack of Political Support for Estate Taxation

We provide an explanation for why estate taxation is surprisingly little used, given the skewness of the estate distribution. Taxing estates implies meddling with intra‐family decisions, which is frown upon by many. At the same time, given the concentration of estates a small proportion of the population stands to gain a lot by decreasing estate taxation. We provide an analytical model, together with numerical simulations, where agents bequeathing large estates make monetary contributions to play up the salience of the encroachment aspects of estate taxation on family decisions and to decrease its political support.