Marco Francesconi

Unequal Bequests

In an NBER Working Paper, Marco Francesconi, together with R. Pollak and D. Tabasso, have made two contributions to the literature on end-of-life transfers. First, their research shows that unequal bequests are much more prevalent than generally recognized, with more than one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among their children. Second, the authors found that many older Americans have no wills. Although the probability of having a will increases with age, 30 percent of individuals aged 70 plus are without a will and, of the people who died between 1995 and 2012, nearly 40 percent died intestate.

Mr. Francesconi’s main area of research is labor economics, with special interest in family economics, sociogenetics, gender, income inequality, early child outcomes, and health economics.

Marco Francesconi has been a Professor of Economics at the University of Essex since September 2004. Previously, he worked for nine years at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, where he continues to be a Research Fellow. Since 2017, he has been a Visiting Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. His PhD in Economics is from New York University. He is an Associate Editor of the European Economic Review and a Co-editor of Labour Economics. Besides being a Research Fellow in the CESifo Research Network, he is also a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Centre for Household Income Labour and Demographic economics (Torino).