Google is certainly passing anchor text when URL structures change and when pages are moved but they don’t seem to pass anchor text when a page is deleted and redirected to the homepage.Well, according to experts and developers of google, google usually takes into account the links that pass go through a 301, but that does not always.
And if a site has the most inbound links with a redirect, you may be penalized by google.
If you have a website and change domain with a 301 redirect, Google took the most incoming links of the old site and pass the new, so it will benefit us equally, although as Matt Cutts said, not all links will be taken into account, but we'll have a chance to recover our popularity and pagerank with the new domain if you do a 301 redirect properly.