State "Death" Taxes and Elderly Migration—The Chicken or the Egg?

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners hypothesize that the elderly may move to avoid paying "death" (estate, inheritance and gift, or EIG) taxes. Past research on elderly migration, however, has been based on cross-sectional data. Cross-sectional analyses may be misleading as many states that are historical net-importers of the elderly were also among the fi rst to reduce or eliminate their EIG taxes. Using time variability in migration patterns and EIG tax policies and using the young as a "control" group eliminates any evidence that EIG policies affect elderly migration. Rather, we provide evidence that the causality may instead run in the other direction.

State taxes and economic growth revisited: have distortions changed?

“…A body of literature has emerged with the intent to understand how fiscal policies such as estate, inheritance and gift taxes affect elderly migration with few results (Conway and Houtenville 1998;Gale and Heath 2000;Conway and Rork 2006). Another body of the literature investigates whether welfare individuals are attracted to favorable fiscal policies of a state, also with many mixed results.…”

Income taxes and the destination of movers to multistate MSAs

“…Conway and Houtenville (2001) find that the elderly tend to migrate to states that have low personal income and death taxes, and which exempt food from sales taxes. Conway and Rork (2006) further examine this issue, suggesting that states may modify tax policy as a result of migration rather than the converse. Here we address a similar issue: how differences in state individual income tax rates affect the migration of households (and their incomes) from state to state.…”

Property Value Assessment Growth Limits, Tax Base Erosion, and Regional In-Migration

“…Previous research evaluating the role of tax policy on migration patterns has used several different specifications. Conway and Rork (2006), for example, use the elderly migration rate as the dependent variable in a linear specification. On the other hand, Conway and Houtenville (2001) use migration flow as the dependent variable in a logarithmic specification.…”