Decisions to donate time or money for charitable purposes are typically seen as make-or-buy decisions, implying that there should be a clear distinction between individuals engaging in one of these two forms of giving and that this distinction should be somehow linked to opportunity costs. But...

Using the introduction of the euro as a natural experiment, we provide economy-wide evidence for money illusion based on declared donations from German administrative income tax data. Our results suggest a magnitude of the money illusion effect between 2.4% and 7.6%. Compared to previous studies...

Many EU Member States only grant tax incentives to resident charities. This limits the choice of donors and restricts the free movement of capital. The paper discusses this problem and the action taken by the European Commission, the ECJ (the Stauffer and Persche cases) and private organisations