Empirical studies of intergenerational transfers usually find that bequests are equally divided among heirs while inter vivos gifts tend to be compensatory. Using the 1992 and 1994 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we find that only 4% of parents who give, divide their gifts equally...

We study the motives behind parents’ transfers to their children, and the relationship between tangible transfers and educational investments. Another issue is the channels parents choose for tangible transfers. Do they use bequests and inter vivos gifts as substitutes or complements? We use a...

An empirical literature has found that neighborhood heterogeneity lowers people's likelihood of contributing to public goods. We show that the estimated effect of any concave neighborhood characteristic on behavior may be biased when “large” rather than “small” neighborhoods are used....

In the vast majority of laboratory experiments documenting the existence of reciprocity subjects are endowed with windfall funds. In many environments with salient fairness considerations such endowments are known to inflate subjects’ other-regarding behavior, thereby creating a so-called...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study whether giving people more time to donate to charity reduces donations. People may intend to donate, but because of the transaction costs of doing so, postpone making the payment until they are less busy, and having postponed making the donation once,...

We conduct a field experiment to analyze the effect of deadline length on charitable giving. Subjects are invited to complete an online survey, with a donation going to charity if they do so. Participants are given either one week, one month or no deadline by which to respond. Donations are...

We show that Rand et al. (2012) and Rand et al. (2014)—who argue that cooperation is intuitive—provide an incorrect interpretation of their own data. They make the mistake of inferring intuition from relative decision times alone, without taking into account absolute decision times. We...

We use a natural field experiment to investigate the hypothesis that generosity is partly involuntary, by examining whether individuals tend to avoid opportunities to act generously. In Sweden, new recycling machines for bottles and cans with an option of donating the returned deposit to charity...

It has recently been argued that giving is spontaneous while greed is calculated (Rand et al. 2012). If greed is calculated we would expect that cognitive load, which is assumed to reduce the influence of cognitive processes, should affect greed. In this paper we study both charitable giving and...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to analyze the effect transactions costs and inertia have on charitable giving. We conjecture that transaction costs will have a greater effect on donations if the solicitation is received when the opportunity cost of time is high. Inertia could become a factor...