In this paper we use experimental data collected in rural Cameroon to quantify the effect of social distance on trust and altruism. Our measure of social distance is one that is relevant to everyday economic interactions: subjects in a Trust Game play with fellow villagers or with someone from a...

We conduct a simple experiment in which student participants are invited to give some of the money that they have earned to an international development charity. In different treatments, participants are given different information about the country in which the donation will be spent. The...

We design an experiment to test whether the behavior of dictators can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic utility function. By giving the recipients an endowment of varying levels, we create an environment that allows for observable differences in behavior depending upon whether pure or...

There is some evidence from field studies and natural experiments that levels of charitable donation depend on the method in which donations are solicited. There is also some experimental evidence that spending on private consumption depends on how much loose change people have. We use a simple...

We show that, if giving is equivalent to not taking, impure altruism could account for List's (2007) finding that the payoff to recipients in a dictator game decreases when the dictator has the option to take. We examine behavior in dictator games with different taking options but equivalent...