Inheritance, as the BBC Sees It

Over in Merry England, Nigella Dawson, a TV chef, says she's leaving nothing to her kids: "I am determined that my children should have no financial security." Her estate-planning stance inspired the BBC News Magazine to take a look at inheritance:

Two tidbits:

Entrepreneurship
[S]ays Professor David Blanchflower, inheriting money early in life makes you more likely to run a business and be self-employed. The correlation continues even into middle age.

"You need money to start a business so if you haven't got it, that prevents you," he says.

Primogeniture
Economist Dr Nick Bloom has studied the management of family firms where the father passes the business on to the eldest son.

"We looked at 5,000 companies and we found that around a third of medium-sized manufacturing firms were family owned. In about half of them the eldest son was the CEO. They are very badly managed."

The BBC article also touches on the idea of recycling death-tax revenues to create "citizens' inheritances." What 25-year-old wouldn't like to receive a state grant big enough to pay off his or her student loans?