学术活动

2026年3月27日（周五）

10:30-12:00

Chamna Yoon教授

首尔大学

Owner-occupied housing is the primary source of wealth for most U.S. households, making the intergenerational transfer of housing a central component of estate planning. Yet little empirical evidence exists on how legal instruments—particularly trusts—shape the transfer of real estate wealth. This is surprising since inheriting a house is one of the few affordable ways to obtain home ownership. This paper studies the role of trusts in facilitating intergenerational housing transfers, combining newly assembled linked administrative data with a dynamic model of parental decision-making. Using property records, household address histories, and mortgage data, we document that trusts are the dominant estate planning tool for housing wealth, while inter vivos gifts play a limited role. To interpret these patterns, we develop a dynamic optimal stopping model in which an altruistic parent chooses whether to retain, gift, sell, or place a house into a trust under uncertainty about longevity, transaction costs, taxation, and probate. Estimation using data from older homeowners in San Diego reveals that the utility from remaining in the home is large, making outright transfers and sales rare. Trusts are attractive because they allow parents to retain control while reducing planning uncertainty and avoiding delays associated with probate. Savings in legal fees account for only a small share of the benefits of trusts, whereas reductions in hassle and uncertainty are central. Policy counterfactuals show that lowering probate legal fees has limited effects on trust formation, while reducing non-monetary probate costs substantially reduces the use of trusts and increases housing market liquidity through higher sales.

Chamna Yoon，首尔大学经济学教授。2013年获得宾夕法尼亚大学经济学博士学位。在加入首尔大学之前，曾任职于纽约市立大学巴鲁克学院（City University of New York, Baruch College）、成均馆大学（SungKyunKwan University）以及韩国科学技术院（KAIST）。其研究主要致力于运用结构化方法估计经济模型，以分析公共经济学以及城市与住房经济学领域的重要问题。相关研究成果发表于多种国际顶级经济学期刊，包括American Economic Review、Journal of Political Economy和Journal of Financial Economics。