In 1979, Australia abolished federal inheritance taxes. Using daily deaths data, Joshua S. Gans and Andrew Leigh show that approximately 50 deaths were shifted from the week before the abolition to the week after (amounting to over half of those who would have been eligible to pay the tax). Their results imply that over the...

Brisbane data showed that domestic property went roughly equally to the next generations of men and women, suggesting the presence of a bilateral system of descent.