Abstract
This chapter presents four arguments supporting an age-differentiated tax on bequests, that is,
a tax rate on bequests that is varying with the age of the deceased. Whereas those arguments
are based on various ethical foundations, and lead to an inheritance tax that can be either
increasing or decreasing with the age of the deceased, our comparative analysis leads us to
regard one of these arguments as more convincing than the three others: the argument
supporting a bequest tax increasing with the age of the deceased, on the grounds of the
compensation of unlucky prematurely dead persons in a world of imperfect information.