Charitable Giving by Married Couples Revisited

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of gender differences and household bargaining on charitable giving. I replicate the study of Andreoni, Brown, and Rischall (2003) using a different data set—the recently available Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) supplement on charitable giving—and test the sensitivity of their results to inclusion of additional control variables and the endogeneity of the tax price of giving. First, focusing on singles, I find that males and females have significantly different tendencies toward giving to different areas of charitable activity. Next, comparing households in which husband and wife make a joint decision on donations with those in which couples separately decide or assign a sole decision-maker, I show that bargaining over giving increases the amount of charitable contributions by almost 7 percent.