In this paper I estimate income and price elasticities of donations to six different charitable causes to test the assumption that charity is a homogeneous good. In the US, charitable donations can be deducted from taxable income. This has long been recognized as producing a price, or taxprice, of giving equal to one minus the marginal tax rate faced by the donor. A substantial portion of the e...

Holding leaders accountable for service excellence can boost charitable donations.

In the United States, charitable contributions can be deducted from taxable income making the price of giving inversely related to the marginal tax rate. The existing literature documents that charitable giving is very responsive to tax subsidies, but often ignores the spillover effects of such policies. This paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on religious particip...

We test a self-signaling theory using two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments. Mobile phone users are randomly sampled to receive promotional offers for movie tickets via SMS technology. Test groups are exposed to different pre-determined levels of price discounts and charitable donations tied to the ticket purchase. The main effects of price discounts and charitable donations ...

Tax policy encourages charitable contributions during an individual’s life through both the personal income tax and the estate tax. The effect of the income tax on contributions is well known. Because annual charitable contributions reduce the size of an estate, and hence the likely estate tax burden, the estate tax should also affect contributions. Recently, Auten and Joulfaian (1996) studied ...