Where does bequest collide?

The reason a person carries wealth to the end of life and passes it to heirs rather than spending it, treated as something a model of saving and consumption must explain. Economists sort these reasons into families: an altruistic motive, where parents value their children's welfare, which Becker's 1974 A Theory of Social Interactions formalised; an accidental motive, where people simply die before running down precautionary savings; and a strategic motive, where Bernheim, Shleifer, and Summers's 1985 The Strategic Bequest Motive showed a parent can hold wealth back to shape a child's attention and behaviour. The referent is a behavioural driver inside a saving model, inferred from how people hold and give wealth, and it is neither the will clause that carries out the gift nor the preservation value a resource holds for the unborn.[1][2]

Unit

A parameter or hypothesis in a lifecycle saving model explaining transfers to heirs

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Tested against data on savings, transfers, and how bequests respond to family behaviour and to the number and attention of heirs

The worth people place on keeping a natural or cultural resource intact so that future generations can have it, counted as one part of a resource's total economic value and separate from any use they make of it themselves. Krutilla's 1967 Conservation Reconsidered argued that people gain satisfaction simply from knowing that a wilderness or species is preserved and will pass to those who come after, an insight that later work grouped with existence value under the heading of non-use value. The referent is a number attached to a forest, river, or heritage site by the willingness of the living to protect it for descendants, and it has nothing to do with a clause in a will or a household's private reason for saving.[3]

Unit

A monetary non-use value assigned to a preserved resource, per person or per household

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Elicited by stated-preference surveys, chiefly contingent valuation, that ask what people would pay to preserve a resource for future generations