Estate taxation with intended and accidental bequests

In this paper we examine the properties of the optimal estate tax in the presence of a complete set of tax instruments available to the social planner. We allow for both types of bequest motives, namely altruistic and accidental. We examine the case for estate taxation which seems to be the strongest (but not impeccable) with accidental bequests. In general, the estate tax is highly sensitive to the relative importance of the two bequest motives. (C) 2002 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.