Four decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the argument that the black family "was not strong enough to create those extended clans that elsewhere were most helpful for businessmen and professionals." Using data from the confidential and restricted access Characteristics of...

This paper experimentally examines image motivation the desire to be liked and well-regarded by others as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior due to crowding out of image...

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one's wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption. We...

Charitable giving for overseas development and emergency relief is important in the UK, being about a quarter of the size of government development aid. There has been a strong growth over time, reflecting the activities of development charities and the public response to a series of...

This article experimentally examines voluntary contributions when group members' marginal returns to the public good vary. The experiment implements two marginal return types, low and high, and uses the information that members have about the heterogeneity to identify the applied contribution...

The problem of the uninsured - those eschewing the purchase of health insurance policies - cannot be fully understood without considering informal alternatives to market insurance called self-insurance and self-protection, including the publicly and charitably-financed safety-net health care...

This paper explores the causal effect of volunteer work providing daily assistance to the elderly on elderly mortality. To identify the causal effect, I exploit the earthquake that occurred in midwestern Japan in 1995 as a natural experiment inducing exogenous variation in the level of...