Volume 38, Number 1 (Winter) 2003
Andreoni, James, Eleanor Brown, and Isaac Rischall. 2003. "Charitable Giving by Married Couples: Who Decides and Why Does it Matter?" Journal of Human Resources 38(1):111-133.
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.
James Andreoni is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Eleanor Brown is a James Irvine Professor of Economics at Pomona, College. Isaac Rischall is in the department of corporate decision science at Citigroup. The authors are grateful to several anonymous referees for helpful comments. Andreoni also thanks the National Science Foundation, and Rischall thanks the Canadian International Labour Network for financial support. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning August 2003 through July 2006 from James Andreoni, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X