Subsidizing charitable giving—for example, for victims of natural disasters—is very popular, not only with governments but also with private organizations. Many companies match their employees' charitable contributions, hoping that this will foster the willingness to contribute....

Social norms are usually neglected in economics, because they are to a large extent enforced through nonmarket interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to work and we show that this norm has important economic effects. The...