Charitable Giving by Married Couples

By James Andreoni, Eleanor Brown, Isaac C. Rischall. The Journal of human resources, 2003

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine how charitable giving is influenced by who in the household is primarily responsible for giving decisions. Looking first at single-person households, we find men and women to have significantly different tastes for giving, setting up a potential conflict for married couples. We find that, with respect to total giving, married households tend to resolve these conflicts largely in favor of the husband’s preferences. Bargaining over charitable giving, rather than letting one spouse take charge, is estimated to reduce giving by at least 6 percent. When the woman is the decisionmaker, she will still make a significantly different allocation of those charity dollars, preferring to give to more charities but to give less to each. Our results give new insights into both the demographics of charitable giving and the costliness of household bargaining.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f4787e645d71edd33a32230138a73fb75a05db7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. René Bekkers
2. Pamala Wiepking

In Economics and Econometrics

1. René Bekkers
2. Pamala Wiepking
3. David M. van Slyke
4. Lucy Woodliffe
5. A. Sargeant

In Gender Studies

1. René Bekkers
2. Pamala Wiepking
3. David M. van Slyke

Citations in the corpus

• Why do People Give? (2005, background): “Jencks (1987) as well as Andreoni, Brown, and Rischall (2003) find that marriage positively relates to giving, though the evidence is mixed, with Randolph (1995) suggesting that marital status is not a significant predictor.”
• Who gives? A literature review of predictors of charitable giving. Part two: gender, marital status, income, and wealth (2012, methodology): “A group of survey studies conducted in Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) examining giving to all types of (both religious and secular) organisations found that while women were more likely to give, men gave higher amounts (Sokolowski, 1996; Andreoni et…”
• The Effects of Race, Gender, and Survey Methodologies on Giving in the US (2005, result): “These results are consistent with Andreoni et al. (2003) who found that, among single people, women were more likely than men to give across all categories of charity.”
• Gift giving: An interdisciplinary review (2007, background): “Andreoni et al. (2003) found that when bargaining over charitable giving takes place within a marriage (rather than one spouse taking charge), household giving is reduced by at least 6%.”
• Who gives what and when? A scenario study of intentions to give time and money (2010, unknown): “Whether the household donates to charity depends on characteristics of both spouses (Andreoni et al., 2003).”