Congressional Budget Office - CBO FTP for 'Technical Paper 2004-08: Charitable Bequests and the Repeal of the Estate Tax'

Technical Paper 2004-08: Charitable Bequests and the Repeal of the Estate Tax

"Two recent articles offer drastically different estimates of the decline in charitable bequests that would be caused by repeal of the estate tax: 12 percent in Joulfaian (2000) and 37 percent in Bakija and Gale (2003). However, with modifications the estimates are actually quite close and a variety of methods yield estimates in the range of 20 percent to 30 percent. Using the coefficients from Bakija et al. (2003) and the best measure of the change in wealth from estate tax repeal implies a 22 percent decline with a 95 percent confidence interval around this estimate of 16 percent to 28 percent."