Public economics.

• Position: Conference held on November 12 to 13, 1998

The NBER's Program on Public Economics, organized by James M. Poterba of MIT, met in Cambridge on November 12-13. The program was:

Richard J. Arnott, NBER and Boston College, "Neutral Property Taxation"

Discussant: Harvey S. Rosen, NBER and Princeton University

2. Douglas Bernheim, NBER and Stanford University, "Bequests as Signals: An Explanation for the Equal Division Puzzle, Unigeniture, and Ricardian Nonequivalence"

Discussant: Louis Kaplow, NBER and Harvard University

William M. Gentry, NBER and Columbia University, and John Penrod, McGill University, "The Tax Benefits of Not-For-Profit Hospitals" (NBER Working Paper No. 6435)

Discussant: James R. Hines, NBER and University of Michigan

Andrei Shleifer and Edward L. Glaeser, NBER and Harvard University, "Not-for-Profit Entrepreneurs" (NBER Working Paper No. 6810)

Discussant: Henry Hansmann, Yale University

Ann Dryden Witte, NBER and Florida International University; Magaly Queralt, Florida International University; Harriett Griesinger, Wellesley College; and Tasneem Chipty, Brandeis University, "Unintended Consequences: Welfare Reform and the Working Poor" (NBER Working Paper No. 6798)

Discussant: Leora Friedberg, NBER and University of California, San Diego

Joel B. Slemrod, NBER and University of Michigan, and Wojceich Kopczuk, University of Michigan, "The Optimal Elasticity of Taxable Income"

Discussant: Austan Goolsbee, NBER and University of Chicago

Jeremy I. Bulow, NBER and Stanford University, and Paul Klemperer, Oxford University, "The Tobacco Deal"

Discussant: Jonathan Gruber, NBER and MIT

Arnott investigates property tax systems (that is, linear taxes on predevelopment land value, postdevelopment structure value, and postdevelopment site value) from a partial equilibrium perspective. In particular, he characterizes property tax systems as to their neutrality with respect to the timing and density of development, and he calculates the deadweight loss from non-neutral property tax systems.

In the United States, more than two thirds of decedents with children divide their estates equally among the children. In contrast, gifts made during the lifetime are usually not equal. Bernheim and Severinov develop a theory that accounts for this behavior, based on the notion that the division of bequests provides a signal about a parent's altruistic preferences. Their theory also can explain the norm of unigeniture that prevails in other societies. When bequests signal parental altruism...