Finance 101 for Physicians.

Although physicians enjoy extensive educational backgrounds, financial planning typically is not a significant component of the curricula they have completed. As a result, many physicians could benefit from greater financial acumen, and their preparation for retirement might be lacking in light of their relatively high-income levels. This article by a private wealth advisor with 29 years of industry experience provides physicians with the basic building blocks to understand and manage their finances. It focuses on 3 pillars of financial planning: (1) protecting themselves, their families, and their assets; (2) reducing their taxes; and (3) growing their wealth.

Differences between sons and daughters in the intergenerational transmission of wealth.

Persistent interest lies in gender inequality, especially with regard to the favouring of sons over daughters. Economists are concerned with how privilege is transmitted across generations, and anthropologists have long studied sex-biased inheritance norms. There has, however, been no focused cross-cultural investigation of how parent-offspring correlations in wealth vary by offspring sex. We estimate these correlations for 38 wealth measures, including somatic and relational wealth, from 15 populations ranging from hunter-gatherers to small-scale farmers. Although small sample sizes limit our statistical power, we find no evidence of ubiquitous male bias, at least as inferred from comparing parent-son and parent-daughter correlations. Rather we find wide variation in signatures of sex bias, with evidence of both son and daughter-biased transmission. Further, we introduce a model that helps pinpoint the conditions under which simple mid-point parent-offspring wealth correlations can reveal information about sex-biased parental investment. Our findings are relevant to the study of female-biased kinship by revealing just how little normative descriptors of kinship systems, such as patrilineal inheritance, capture intergenerational correlations in wealth, and how variable parent-son and parent-daughter correlations can be. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals'.

Incidental Bequests and the Choice to Self-Insure Late-Life Risks.

Despite facing significant uncertainty about their lifespans and health care costs, most retirees do not buy annuities or long-term care insurance. In this paper, I find that retirees' saving and insurance choices are highly inconsistent with standard life-cycle models in which people care only about their own consumption but match well models in which bequests are luxury goods. Bequest motives tend to reduce the value of insurance by reducing the opportunity cost of precautionary saving. The results suggest that bequest motives significantly increase saving and significantly decrease purchases of long-term care insurance and annuities.

Home-ownership in Europe: How did it happen?

We use data from the third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARELIFE)(1) to document the different ways individuals first became home-owners across countries and over cohorts over the second half of the 20th century. Focusing on first-time home owners we find that younger cohorts became home-owners earlier and were more likely to do it through credit, less likely to inherit their home directly. Having higher human capital, being employed, married, having children and living in an urban area, all make it more likely to purchase a home with a mortgage. The persistence of family help in accessing home-ownership in many countries demonstrates the interrelation between family, market and the state in most of continental Europe.

Investigating early modern Ottoman consumer culture in the light of Bursa probate inventories.

This study investigates the development of early modern Ottoman consumer culture. In particular, the democratization of consumption, which is a significant indicator of the development of western consumer cultures, is examined in relation to Ottoman society. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century probate inventories of the town of Bursa combined with literary and official sources are used in order to identify democratization of consumption and the macro conditions shaping this development. Findings demonstrate that commercialization, international trade, urbanization which created a fluid social structure, and the ability of the state to negotiate with guilds were possible contextual specificities which encouraged the democratization of consumption in the Bursa context.

Inheritances, health and death.

We examine how wealth shocks, in the form of inheritances, affect the mortality rates, health status and health behaviors of older adults, using data from eight waves of the Health and Retirement Survey. Our main finding is that bequests do not have substantial effects on health, although improvements in quality-of-life are possible. This absence occurs despite increases in out-of-pocket spending on healthcare and in the utilization of medical services, especially discretionary and non-lifesaving types such as dental care. Nor can we find a convincing indication of changes in lifestyles that offset the benefits of increased medical care. Inheritances are associated with higher alcohol consumption, but with no change in smoking or exercise and a possible decrease in obesity.

The effect of ethnicity and economy upon intergenerational coresidence: northern Norway during the last part of the nineteenth century.

During the last part of the nineteenth century, Finnmark province and the northern part of Troms experienced a decline in intergenerational coresidence. This article discusses what impact ethnic affiliation and economic activity had on the living arrangements of the elderly, and what contributed to the change. Logistic regression shows that ethnicity played a role but its effect disappears after controlling for economic activity. Intergenerational coresidence was positively associated with being a married Sámi male with an occupation in farming or combined fishing and farming. As such a person grew older, he was increasingly likely to live separately from an own adult child. This pattern changed toward the end of nineteenth century. By the close of the century, ethnic differences had disappeared, and headship position, irrespective of marital status, was strongly related to coresidence.

Enduring love? Attitudes to family and inheritance law in England and Wales.

This paper reports on the findings from a large-scale study of public attitudes to inheritance law, particularly the rules on intestacy. It argues that far from the assumption that the family' is in terminal decline, people in England and Wales still view their most important relationships, at least for the purposes of inheritance law, as centred on a narrow, nuclear family model. However, there is also widespread acceptance of re-partnering and cohabitation, producing generally high levels of support for including cohabitants in the intestacy rules and for ensuring that children from former relationships are protected. We argue that these views are underpinned by a continuing sense of responsibility to the members of one's nuclear family, arising from notions of sharing and commitment, dependency and support, and a sense of lineage.

Inheriting, marrying, and founding farms: women's place on the land.

This article considers rural women's place on the land in south-central New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on a community history and ethnographic study conducted during the 1980s, the article draws on women's oral narratives to explore the connections between women's sense of agency and their relationship to the land through descent and inheritance, marriage into a landowning family, founding a farm in partnership, and the experience of dispossession.

"Revolting to humanity": oversights, limitations, and complications of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926.

This article analyses three areas that limited the effectiveness of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926. First, re-registration was public, expensive, and time-consuming. Second, the Treasury Office used the change in the law of intestacy to refuse more distant relatives' claims on estates. Third, the law separated legitimacy from nationality, thus denying citizenship to legitimated children born abroad of British fathers and foreign mothers. In short, both because of parliamentary oversights and civil servants' narrow interpretations of the law, relatively few children took advantage of the Act, and the minority who did, rather than being 'illegitimate' or 'legitimate', were a third category, the 'legitimated'.

Women's property rights and gendered policies: implications for women's long-term welfare in rural Tanzania.

This paper evaluates effects of community-level women's property and inheritance rights on women's economic outcomes using a 13 year longitudinal panel from rural Tanzania. In the preferred model specification, inverse probability weighting is applied to a woman-level fixed effects model to control for individual-level time invariant heterogeneity and attrition. Results indicate that changes in women's property and inheritance rights are significantly associated with women's employment outside the home, self-employment and earnings. Results are not limited to sub-groups of marginalised women. Findings indicate lack of gender equity in sub-Saharan Africa may inhibit economic development for women and society as a whole.

Corresponding affections: emotional exchange among siblings in the Nassau family.

This article examines the nature of emotional exchange among the siblings who were the children of William the Silent, leader of the nascent Dutch Republic. Using evidence from extensive familial correspondence, it asks how the language of emotions could constitute forms of power within the family, by analyzing how actions and expressions of emotion were presented, discussed, and interpreted in epistolary form, to whom, and with what intention and impact. The article studies social, geographic, linguistic, and other distinctions between siblings in their use of affective discourses in correspondence and argues that attention to affective language can help to elucidate the agentive force of emotions in both reflecting and informing notions of power within the family.

The influence of motivational messages on future planning behaviors among HIV concordant positive and discordant couples in Lusaka, Zambia.

In Zambia the HIV/AIDS epidemic has resulted in many single female-headed households. Strong patriarchal laws and customs prevent widows and children from maintaining economic assets. This study examines the impact of a video-based motivational intervention promoting future planning in 1,504 HIV-infected couples in Lusaka, Zambia. Following a group video session, couples randomized to the motivational arm could choose to write a will, identify a guardian for their children and make financial plans. Desirable behaviours modelled in the motivational video were measured at quarterly intervals for a year and compared in intervention and control arms. Demographic measures including age, income and educational status were not associated with planning behaviours. Participation in the intervention was associated with will writing (23% versus 5%) and naming a guardian (32% versus 17%) but not with other planning behaviours. The study demonstrates the ability of motivational messages integrated into HIV VCT to encourage future planning behaviour and points to the need to expand existing HIV and VCT services to meet other non-health needs of those living with HIV.

Property grabbing and will writing in Lusaka, Zambia: an examination of wills of HIV-infected cohabiting couples.

High rates of HIV and poverty place women in a precarious economic situation in Lusaka, Zambia. Mortality from HIV infection is high, leaving many households single headed and creating almost a half a million orphans. One of the most prevalent forms of gender violence that creates poverty in women is when the male's family claims the property of the deceased from the widow and the children. The Zambia-Emory HIV Research Project collected 184 wills from individuals in monogamous unions where one or both of the individuals were HIV-positive. Despite the fact that many wills specifically stated that their extended family was not allowed to tamper with their possessions in the event of death, property grabbing proved to be a prevalent and difficult issue in Lusaka. In order to improve the lives of widowed women in Lusaka, the government and other civic and non-governmental organisations must inform women of their rights to own and protect their land and other assets in the event of their husbands' death, an issue of increasing importance in the area of HIV/AIDS.