Estate Planning Behaviour: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Estate planning is a financial tool for an individual to manage wealth upon his incapacitation or death. Although there are numerous studies on estate planning, there still needs to be an effort to systematically review the estate planning measurements. The paper aims to systematically review the literature published between 1990 to 2021 and evaluate the measures of estate planning and its methodological qualities. The systematic literature review process was guided by the PRISMA protocol, where the articles were selected based on established databases such as WOS, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar. The final sample of 24 articles was reviewed for the estate planning measurement, and it was found that previous studies examined estate planning as a tool for financial, wealth distribution, and succession planning. The measurements of only 10 studies were found to be sufficiently validated, rendering other studies under review to be inadequate in establishing sound empirical conclusions. This review contributes to assisting future researchers in choosing well-validated measurements of estate planning and adapting them accordingly to each context.