The Economics of Inheritance and Inter-Vivos Gifts: A Switzerland-Focused Macro Evidence Base from OECD Revenue Statistics (4300)

Inheritance and inter-vivos gifts are central mechanisms of wealth transmission and a core object of public economics. Switzerland is a high-leverage setting because it combines high private wealth with strong fiscal federalism, where inheritance and gift taxes are largely cantonal. This working paper develops a Switzerland-focused empirical narrative using a harmonized long-run panel from OECD Revenue Statistics for estate, inheritance and gift taxes (tax code 4300; sub-codes 4310 and 4320 where available). It (i) benchmarks Swiss 4300 revenues in levels and shares, (ii) places 4300 within the broader property-tax mix (4000), jointly with recurrent net wealth taxes (4200), and (iii) provides transparent summaries of Switzerland’s relative drift using a two-way fixed-effects “Switzerland × trend” specification and exact placebo (randomization-inference) distributions for treated-minus-others differences over 1990–2022 and 2018–2022. The goal is measurement discipline rather than causal identification: aggregate revenues cannot identify transfer flows or behavioral mechanisms, but they help anchor cross-country comparisons and motivate a microdata agenda exploiting Swiss cantonal variation. Replication materials are provided under the associated Zenodo record/DOI.