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Journal Article
When donors feel generous: economic research on prosocial behavior
New research shows that people donate time and money at the level of peers to groups with which they identify?and that they want to see the impact of their giving. Nonprofits seeking volunteers and funds will find the insights useful.
Working Paper
Do subsidies increase charitable giving in the long run?: matching donations in a field experiment
Subsidizing charitable giving, for example, for victims of natural disasters, is very popular, not only with governments but also with private organizations. Many companies, for example, match their employees? charitable contributions, hoping that this will foster the willingness to contribute. However, systematic analyses of the effect of such a matching mechanism are still lacking. ; This paper tests the effect of matching charitable giving in a randomized field experiment in the short and the long run. The donations of a randomly selected group were matched by contributions from an ...
Working Paper
The widow’s offering: inheritance, family structure, and the charitable gifts of women
This paper aims to explain disparities in the charitable bequest behavior of men and women. I use data on charitable bequests in wills from 17th Century Suffolk, England to investigate whether women or men were more generous to the poor when they died. Because of the difference in the legal restrictions faced by married men and married women, I choose to compare unmarried individuals. Higher proportions of unmarried men make charitable donations and men make higher average donations. I find that differences in the wealth, circumstances and family status of women can explain between 58% and ...
Journal Article
The economics of charitable giving: what gives?
Americans are estimated to have raised their donations to charity three-fold over the past 40 years. What motivates them to give?
Working Paper
Charity and the bequests motive: evidence from seventeenth century wills
This paper researches the motivations for charitable bequests by looking at gifts to the poor in the wills of 1357 testators who died in Suffolk, England in the 1620's and 1630's. I find that wealth, religiosity, and the presence of family and friends influence testator generosity. The finding that wealthier, more religious individuals, and those with fewer children give more to the poor support an altruistic model of testator utility. However, the finding that individuals who give to more people outside of their immediate families are more likely to give to the poor contradicts the simple ...
Working Paper
Do people behave in experiments as in the field?: evidence from donations
Laboratory experiments are an important methodology in economics, especially in the field of behavioral economics. However, it is still debated to what extent results from laboratory experiments can be applied to field settings. One highly important question with respect to the external validity of experiments is whether individuals act the same in experiments as they would in the field. ; This paper presents evidence on how individuals behave in donation experiments and how the same individuals behave in a naturally occurring decision situation on charitable giving. The results show that ...
Working Paper
Does government spending really crowd out charitable contributions? new time series evidence
We exploit the time series properties of charitable giving data to provide additional insights into the crowding out of charitable contributions in response to government spending. We find that the short-run and long-run government spending and charitable giving relationships are quite different - the long run relationship appears to be largely spurious, and estimates of the short-run relationship provide only weak evidence of crowding out. We also find that system estimation can improve upon the efficiency of single equation models used in previous works. Our results support the prestige ...
Journal Article
The generosity cycle : charitable giving during downturns
Related links: https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2010/q2/feature3_weblinks.cfm
Journal Article
Charitable giving rates follow the economy and personal income
Journal Article
The economics of giving