We develop a technique to assess the impact of changes in mortgage markets on households, exploiting an implication of the permanent income hypothesis: The higher a household's expected future income, the higher its desired consumption, ceteris paribus. With perfect credit markets, desired...

We estimate the effect of a marginal personal solicitation after receiving two to four non-personal solicitations using observational data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we refer to as Anon U. At Anon U, volunteers use lists provided by the Development Office to...

We investigate how undergraduates’ financial aid packages affect their subsequent dona-tive behavior as alumni. The empirical work is based upon a rich set of micro data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we call Anon U. We focus on three types of financial aid,...

Governor Romney has proposed a personal income tax reform that would lower marginal tax rates and broaden the tax base. Critics of the proposal have argued that high-income taxpayers would receive a tax cut, and given that the proposal is meant to be revenue neutral, this would inevitably lead...

Public Finance is the branch of economics that studies the taxing and spending activities of government. The term is something of a misnomer, because the fundamental issues are not financial (that is, relating to money). Rather, the key problems relate to the use of real resources. For this...

In recent years many employers, both in the private and public sectors, have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. However, little is known about their...

One justification offered for legacy admissions policies at universities is that that they bind entire families to the university. Proponents maintain that these policies have a number of benefits, including increased donations from members of these families. We use a rich set of data from an...

This paper examines whether altruistic behavior is habit forming. We take advantage of a data set that includes a rich set of information concerning individuals’ donations of cash and time as adults as well as information about whether they were involved with charitable activities when they...

Most data sets indicate a positive correlation between having health insurance and good health, and between having health insurance and utilizing health care services. Yet the direction of causality is not at all clear. If we observe a positive correlation between the utilization of health care...

The “iron law of fundraising” says that people do not donate to a charity unless they are asked. We test the iron law using observational data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we refer to as Anon U. At Anon U, volunteers use lists provided by the Devel-opment...