This paper examines the effect of wealth on labour market behaviour. Providing convincing evidence on this relationship is challenging since wealth and labour supply may be endogenously determined. We overcome this by looking at wealth shocks in the form of inheritances, distinguishing between unanticipated and anticipated inheritances. We provide a theoretical framework which outlines how an individual's labour market behaviour may be expected to react to a wealth shock under different circumstances including perfect/imperfect anticipation and a credit constrained environment. We test our model predictions using rich household and individual level micro-data for Germany. We find that women decrease their hours of work in response to an inheritance. Both men and women are more likely to stay self-employed after a large inheritance and male entrepreneurs are also more likely to recruit. The effect of inheritances on the self-employed is amplified for those who are credit constrained. The magnitude of these effects is similar for anticipated and unanticipated inheritances but the timing varies, with effects visible before the event in the case of anticipated inheritances.

中文翻译：

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继承后的劳动力供给与期望的作用

本文考察了财富对劳动力市场行为的影响。为这种关系提供令人信服的证据具有挑战性，因为财富和劳动力供应可能是内生决定的。我们通过以继承的形式观察财富冲击，区分意外和预期的继承来克服这一点。我们提供了一个理论框架，该框架概述了个人的劳动力市场行为在不同情况下（包括完美/不完美的预期和信用受限环境）可能如何应对财富冲击。我们使用德国丰富的家庭和个人层面的微观数据来测试我们的模型预测。我们发现女性因继承遗产而减少工作时间。男性和女性在继承大笔遗产后更有可能继续自雇，男性企业家也更有可能招聘。对于信用受限的人，继承对个体经营者的影响被放大。对于预期和非预期遗传，这些影响的程度相似，但时间不同，在预期遗传的情况下，影响在事件发生之前可见。