Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Inheritance And Financial Health: The Correlation Between Intergenerational Wealth Transfers And Income Levels Of Personal Bankruptcies, Benjamin D. Kahn

CMC Senior Theses

This paper describes the correlations between intergenerational wealth transfers, or IWTs, and income of households in bankruptcy as existing research does not address any linkage between the two events. The effect that inheritances, trust payments, and lump sum gifts have on personal finances will impact the millions of Americans who will receive such transfers during the “Great Wealth Transfer” of the coming decades. I use bankruptcy data from the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database, or IDB, and income data from the University of Michigan’s Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, or PSID, to produce a dataset that contains average IWT values …