Beschreibung:
This paper studies the effect of inter-vivos transfers on the recipients’ labour supply. We focus on couples who are in the “rush hour of life”. Our administrative dataset on the whole Dutch population allows us to track tax-registered inter-vivos transfers and labour income. To account for potential endogeneity of receiving a (substantial) gift with respect to labour income, we exploit a gift tax reform in 2013 in the Netherlands. Our findings suggest a small negative effect of inter-vivos transfers on labour income in the year of the gift. We do not find effects on spousal labour earnings. Moreover, a gift is found to reduce mortgage debt by approximately 25% and our findings suggest that the gift is generally not used to move to a more expensive home