are contributions of time and money substitutes or complements abstractthis article empirically investigates the relationship between donations of time and money using canadian tax policy reforms that changed the tax price of charitable donations the 1988 reform where a charitable tax deduction was converted to a credit and the 2000 reform in provincial income taxes provide tax price variations plausibly exogenous to individuals unobserved heterogeneity our estimates on cross price effects imply that individuals make more time donations as the tax price of charitable donations increases and hence money and time donations are substitutes as some theories would imply this contrasts with earlier findings using cross sectional data

professional achievements and gender differences among academic economists i introduction while the academic labor market for economists attracts a good deal of attention among its participants work on the differences in remuneration for economic research and other professional characteristics between men and women in academic institutions has been limited this paper tests for gender differences using data on grants and grant applications from the national science foundation ault rutman and stevenson 1979 addressing issues of academic placement found that the highest rated institution at which an academic economist will be employed is the institution of first employment willis and pieper 1991 found that women who received doctorates in economics in the 1970s had a somewhat higher rate of placement at doctoral degree granting institutions than men but that there was no difference in the rank of the institutions for these placements lower tier institutions must offer promotions to attract candidates moore et al 1983 reported that the rank of the department at which one earned the doctorate is critically important in determining initial academic placement hamermesh johnson and weisbrod 1982 found that for those at prestigious departments increases in citations lead to salary increases but that the department s rank was not inversely related to salary in his review of work by sociologists youn 1988 reported that the prestige of an academic institution was positively related to the research productivity of its scientists there are two competing hypotheses that might explain this result better departments select better scientists achievement model or better departments foster greater productivity ascription model empirical efforts to distinguish between these hypotheses have been mixed the research on salary differentials in academia has generally found that there are significant gender differences that widen during the careers of men and women 1 barbezat 1991 the most recent evidence suggests that salary differentials in the academic community may have diminished somewhat since the 1960s but still remain weiler 1990 separated the influence of the department s rank on salary by treating it in a separate equation and found that standard formulations underestimate the degree of salary discrimination although important salary is not the only measure of achievement in academe promotion to a higher rank employment in key departments and the production of well placed articles all help determine an economist s influence in the profession but despite the dramatic increase in the percentage of women receiving the ph d during the past two decades the number of senior women at graduate institutions is still very low 2 to what extent does gender bias exist in economics departments as measured not only by salary but also by other achievements such as the likelihood of achieving a senior position or being employed by a top department is there a difference in the experiences of the younger cohorts compared to their more senior counterparts this paper attempts to answer these important questions by 1 taking into account the endogeneity of the variables that are usually treated as exogenous in models of salary determination and thereby broadening the characteristics that traditionally reflect discrimination and 2 using a new detailed data base developed from the national science foundation the results of this more complete model in which salary as well as other measures of professional achievement are explained show significant differences between men and women at the more senior level at the assistant professor level although the signs of the gender coefficients are consistent with a discrimination hypothesis the results are not statistically significant ii the model single equations using the techniques developed by oaxaca 1973 and blinder 1973 have long been used to estimate gender salary differentials in academia with productivity measures such as books and articles published administrative experience etc

sources of intra industry wage dispersion how much do employers matter observed human capital explains less than half of wage variation in bls industry wage surveys establishment based wage differentials controlling for occupation account for 20 70 percent of intra industry wage variation this corresponds to a standard deviation in wages of 14 percent of the mean almost as large as interindustry wage variation investigation suggests that establishment wage differentials are not random variations or returns to usual measures of human capital

the new institutional economics this outstanding book presents new original contributions from some of the world s leading economists including ronald coase douglass c north masahiko aoki oliver e williamson and harold demsetz it demonstrates the extent and depth of the new institutional economics research programme which is having a worldwide impact on the economics profession

charitable giving by married couples who decides and why does it matter we examine how charitable giving is influenced by who in the household is primarily responsible for giving decisions looking first at single person households we find men and women to have significantly different tastes for giving setting up a potential conflict for married couples we find that with respect to total giving married households tend to resolve these conflicts largely in favor of the husband s preferences bargaining over charitable giving rather than letting one spouse take charge reduces giving by about six percent when the woman is the decision maker she will still make a significantly different allocation of those charity dollars preferring to give to more charities but to give less to each our results give new insights into both the demographics of charitable giving and the costliness of household bargaining

demand for charity donations in private non profit markets the case of the u k abstract this paper presents estimates of the demand for donations for u k charities in 1985 these estimates make demand depend upon price fund raising expenditure a quality index and alternative revenue sources the price elasticity of donations found here shows for the most part an elastic response and is consistent with previous studies using u s data our empirical results suggest that non profits in the u k unlike their counterparts in the u s are net revenue maximisers we discovered no significant evidence that public donations crowded out private donations in our sample of 300 charities

intergenerational linkages in consumption behavior consumption is partly a social activity yet most studies of consumer behavior treat households in isolation we investigate familial relationships in consumption patterns using a sample of parents and their children from the panel study of income dynamics we nd a positive and statistically signi cant parent speci c eect on children s consumption even after controlling for the eect of parental income and we nd similar eects for sibling pairs child consumption responds negatively to large post retirement shortfalls in consumption of the parents this behavior holds up even after allowing for the possibility of smaller parent to child transfers made necessary by the parental consumption shortfalls these results suggest that although income is an important source of the intergenerational correlation parental choices and experiences also aect consumption behavior of the children

why do parents socialize their children to behave pro socially an information based theory we present a model of intergenerational transmission of pro social values in which parents have information about relevant characteristics of society that is not directly available to their children dierently from existing models of cultural transmission of values such as bisin and verdier 2001 and tabellini 2008 we assume that parents are exclusively concerned with their children s material welfare if parents coordinate their educational choices a child would look at her system of values to predict the values of her contemporaries with whom she may interact a parent may thus choose to instil prosocial values into his child in order to signal to her that others can generally be trusted this implies that parents may optimally decide to endow their children with values that stand in contrast with maximization of material welfare even if their children s material welfare is all they care about jel codes d64 d82 h41 z13

does welfare spending crowd out charitable activity evidence from historical england under the poor laws this paper examines the relationship between government spending and charitable activity we present a novel way of testing the crowding out hypothesis making use of the fact that welfare provision under the old poor laws was decided on the parish level thus giving the heterogeneity we need to test for the impact of different levels of welfare support within a single country using data on poor relief spending combined with data on charitable incomes by county for two years before and after 1800 we find a positive relationship areas with more public provision also enjoyed higher levels of charitable income these results are confirmed when instrumenting for poor law spending using the distance to london and historical migration to london as well as when looking at first differences

why do people volunteer an experimental analysis of preferences for time donations why do individuals volunteer their time even when recipients receive far less value than the donor s opportunity cost previous models of altruism that focus on the overall impact of a gift cannot rationalize this behavior despite its prevalence we develop a model that allows for differential warm glow depending on the form of the donation in a series of laboratory experiments that control for other aspects of volunteering such as its signaling value subjects demonstrate behavior consistent with the theoretical assumption that gifts of time produce greater utility than the same transfers in the form of money subjects perform an effort task accruing earnings at potentially different wage rates for themselves or a charity of their choice with the ability to transfer any of their personal earnings to charity at the end of the experiment subjects exhibit strong preferences for donating time even when differential wage rates make it costly to do so the results provide new insights on the nature of vo

evidence on the volunteer labor supply of married women 1 introduction in this paper i investigate the volunteer labor supply of married women there are dozens of studies that examine the labor supply of married women and a smaller number that investigate the supply of volunteer labor in general as far as i know there are none that have focused on the supply of volunteer labor by married women i analyze time diary data for the 1970s to consider one main question and three subsidiary questions i what was the direct effect of economic variables after tax wage rate and other income on married women s volunteering both participation and hours ii does the number of children in the family influence the volunteering of married women to the extent that rising wages may induce smaller family size is this an indirect channel that reduces volunteering if one of the motivations for volunteering is to increase the quantity or quality of activities for one s own children the 1970s is an especially interesting time period to examine in the united states as that was the decade that saw the first large increases in married women s labor force participation rates iii are time and donations substitutes or complements for married women iv do the data support the brown and lankford 1992 modeling conjecture concerning a sequence of time allocation decisions as opposed to the gronau model of household time allocation where such decisions are made simultaneously gronau 1986 i find that i the volunteer labor supply for married women is positively sloped and inelastic with an estimated wage elasticity of 0 64 rises in the net wage have a small negative effect on married women s participation in volunteer activities a 25 rise in the net wage is associated with a 1 drop in the probability of volunteering there is a small negative other income from assets and husband s earnings elasticity of volunteer labor supply 0 09 so other sources of income mattered for married women s volunteering in the 1970s the effect of other income on married women s volunteer participation is positive ii having more children increases the probability of volunteering but reduces the number of hours volunteered iii donations of time and money appear to be substitutes overall the elasticity of married women s volunteer hours with respect to the tax price of giving is greater than two the participation effect is again negative this result is tentative because the data are not based on tax return information and i lack good information on cash donations iv there is mixed support for the brown and lankford conjecture the finding of a positive wage elasticity of volunteer labor supply is at odds with the opportunity cost of time interpretation of the wage especially as the finding for other income is also negative implying that volunteer hours are an inferior good substitution and income effects would therefore both be in a negative direction as the net wage rises the results with the sequential specification are sensible and easily interpreted but the key parameter estimate does not quite meet conventional standards of statistical significance increased hours of work decrease married women s participation and hours an added test of the sequential model is less favorable the wage findings suggest that rising wages for women caused a reduced incidence of volunteering among married women but if anything increased the hours of volunteering one possible vehicle for this would be the entry of women into professional careers where volunteering is a normal part of the career another possible explanation is that married women with a loose attachment to volunteering stopped volunteering and those married women with greater attachment to volunteering increased their hours commitments to offset the participation effect the link between children and volunteering is important as an indicator of how much selfinterest is involved in volunteering for example school volunteering may be a way of providing enhanced investment in one s own children where the benefit to others is a by product

structural change in europe s gas markets three scenarios for the development of the european gas market to 2020 abstract against the background of the european union s gas directive and the emergence of new players and markets in europe s gas sector this paper explores how company actions could shape the future for the gas industry starting with an examination of company strategies this paper develops three scenarios for the future a gradual transformation scenario where a single european gas market develops that is essentially oligopolistic in nature a vertical integration scenario where upstream and downstream gas companies merge to form a vertically integrated gas supplier and a pull the plug scenario where the current market structure decomposes into a competitive market these scenarios are examined in terms of their impact on gas prices demand and the distribution of gas rent along the supply chain the paper highlights the fact that the eu s gas directive is not sufficient for the introduction of competition into europe s gas markets but that company actions will be the key determinant and they may favour alternative market structures

regulatory intervention on the dynamic european gas market neoclassical economics or transaction cost economics shifts at the international gas market indicate that the transaction cost perspective provides better underpinnings for european gas regulation than the current neoclassical perspective three implications are that policymakers should 1 allow alternative coordination measures to complement market exchange 2 recognize that less than perfect competition outcomes may be optimal and 3 be more reticent in prescribing interventionist measures finally the analysis provides the foundations for the empirical research required to complement this paper s theoretical approach

does it pay for women to volunteer this article estimates the economic and noneconomic returns to volunteering for prime aged women estimates of a dcdp model indicate that an extra year of volunteer experience increases wage offers by 8 5 in future part time work and by 2 6 in future full time work on average working for free increases lifetime earnings by 16 7 the economic returns to volunteering are more important than the noneconomic returns in increasing lifetime utility the model also reveals an adverse selection mechanism into volunteering that helps explain why reduced form regressions of the returns to working for free will likely be downward biased

testing economic models of volunteer labour supply some empirical evidence for the german red cross we use a new data set collected by means of a questionnaire study of volunteers of the german red cross to test predictions of three competing economic models of volunteer labour supply the public goods model the private consumption model and the human capital model the three competing economic models make different predictions regarding the response of a volunteer s labour supply to a change in the perceived labour supply of other volunteers our empirical results lend support to the public goods model

socially responsible investments among parents and adult children novel evidence is provided of a positive correlation between parents and their children s socially responsible mutual fund investment behavior although captured parent child correlations reflect

volunteering and life or financial shocks does income and wealth matter volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state however although the literature on volunteering is extensive knowledge on how life s discontinuities life and financial shocks affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static cross sectional data to reduce this shortcoming we use longitudinal data from australia hilda that track the same individuals over time to assess how individuals from different income and wealth groups respond to life and financial shocks with respect to volunteering although both income and wealth can act as buffers against life shocks by providing stability and reducing vulnerability which decreases the need to actually change behaviour patterns we observe more heterogeneity than expected and also stickiness at the lowest income levels response delays in post shock volunteering also suggest that volunteering habits may be driven and influenced by strong commitment and motivation that are not shattered by life or financial shocks in fact the amount of time spent volunteering tends to increase after negative income shocks and decrease after positive income shocks

a theory of impact philanthropy this article develops a new model of altruism called impact philanthropy an impact philanthropist is someone who wants to personally make a difference while that motive is straightforward its logical implications are significantly different from other models of philanthropy for example the contributions of other donors can reduce an impact philanthropist s charitable fulfillment as a result cooperation among impact philanthropists can reduce aggregate giving in addition impact philanthropy can lead to a codependent relationship between givers and receivers in which both benefit from the other finally the model suggests a conflict between charitable organizations and its donors concerning the allocation of charitable gifts in particular a charitable organization prefers to spread a donor s contribution across many goods whereas a donor prefers to target his or her contribution at a specific good d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

family model of contributions to non profit organizations and labour supply in this article a model is presented in which the family decides the labour supply of both spouses and their time donations to non profit organizations for the estimation spanish data was used which showed that family size and pre school children influence decisions made about time distribution of husband and wife women with fewer family responsibilities work longer hours and donate more time whilst the effect on men is the contrary also monetary donations by the family are directly related to time donations by the spouses

the stability of social preferences in a low income neighborhood we investigate whether social preferences are stable across contexts using a field population of low income americans we develop and demonstrate a simplified visually based experimental methodology appropriate for this population we show that choices in a laboratory public goods game predict giving in real donation experiments as well as self reported donations and volunteering outside the lab at the same time choices vary systematically by individual characteristics and decision context thus our results provide evidence both for an underlying stable social preference and for the role of context in influencing the expression of that preference

charitable contributions and intergenerational transfers abstract this paper investigates the effects of bequest taxes and the income of children on the lifetime charitable contributions of parents using matched income tax records for parents and children the results show a positive elasticity of 0 6 for contributions with respect to the tax price of bequests the paper also finds that the income of children affects the amount that parents contribute to charity the results show a positive elasticity of up to 0 14 for contributions by parents with respect to the income of children implying that when children are better off parents are likely to increase charitable giving

of age sex and money insights from corporate officer compensation on the wage inequality between genders this paper shows that the gender and age of the wage setter are crucial determinants of the disparity in wages between sexes we document our findings using a data set on compensation of corporate officers that is uniquely suited for this analysis because officer wages are set by chief executive officers ceos we show that ceos pay officers of the opposite gender less than officers of their own gender even when controlling for job characteristics older and male ceos exhibit the greatest propensity to differentiate on the basis of sex female officers receive smaller raises if the firm is headed by a man our results suggest that ceo gender and age are economically more important determinants of officer compensation than are firm stock performance stock volatility or return on assets this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

an economic approach to social capital a standard optimal investment model can be used to analyse an individual s decision to accumulate social capital we analyse six facts that support the predictions of this individual based approach 1 social capital first rises and then falls with age 2 social capital declines with expected mobility 3 social capital rises in occupations with greater returns to social skills 4 social capital is higher among homeowners 5 social connections fall sharply with physical distance 6 people who invest in human capital also invest in social capital we fail to find robust evidence that social capital investments fall with the value of time or that geographic religious groups generate social capital complementarities

academic wage structure by gender the roles of peer review performance and market forces we focus on understanding the role of productivity in determining wage structure differences between men and women in academia the data arise from a pay equity study carried out in a single midwestern u s university over the 1996 1997 academic year econometric results confirm that external market forces exert influence over both male and female salary but peer review ratings play a significant role in male but not female earnings determination with similar results for objective measures of research teaching and service

gas market distorting effects of imbalanced gas balancing rules inefficient regulation of pipeline flexibility this paper analyzes the value and cost of line pack flexibility in liberalized gas markets through examination of the techno economic characteristics of gas transport pipelines and the trade offs between different ways to use the infrastructure transport and flexibility line pack flexibility is becoming increasingly important as a tool to balance gas supply and demand over different periods in the european liberalized market context a monopolist unbundled network operator offers regulated transport services and flexibility balancing services according to the network code and balancing rules therefore gas policy makers should understand the role and consequences of line pack regulation the analysis shows that the line pack flexibility service has an important economic value for the shippers and the tso furthermore the analysis identifies distorting effects in the gas market due to inadequate regulation of line pack flexibility by disregarding the sunk costs of flexibility in the balancing rules the overall efficiency of the gas system is decreased finally the analysis demonstrates that the actual costs of line pack flexibility are related to the peak cumulative imbalance throughout the balancing period any price for pipeline flexibility should therefore be based on the related trade off between the right to use the line pack flexibility and the provision of transport services

gifts of money and gifts of time estimating the effects of tax prices and available time abstract we develop a model that recognizes interdepence between individuals charitable cash donations and volunteer labor using survey data we estimate giving functions jointly allowing a binding non negativity constraint in one giving equation to affect the form of the other the tax price of money giving is significant in all equations with estimated elasticities of 1 7 for money giving 2 1 for women s time and 1 1 for men s time the complementarity between volunteer labor and cash donations suggests that the effect of tax policy on philanthropy is understated by considering monetary donations alone

the gender salary gap in british academia this paper considers salary determination and the gender salary gap in the academic labour market utilizing a particularly detailed data set of academics from five old established universities results reveal an aggregate gender salary differential for academic staff of 15 most of this differential can however be explained by our model evidence suggests a limited opportunity for female academics to combine career and family despite the flexibility of an academic job and emphasizes the importance of mobility to the male career publication record is found to be an important determinant of salary

gender and racial earnings differentials in academic labor markets this study estimates earnings differentials across racial and gender groups among college faculty and decomposes these differentials into the components attributable to differences in individual and institutional characteristics and that which remains unexplained we find that white females earn approximately 4 percent less than white males black males earn 7 4 percent more black females earn one percent more hispanic males earn 2 7 percent more hispanic females earn 1 7 percent less and asian males earn 7 7 percent more than comparable white males we also find a significant earnings penalty for being a naturalized citizen or noncitizen versus an u s born citizen

union wage differentials in the public and private sectors a simultaneous equations specification the paper attempts to integrate new approaches to estimating union wage effects with the analysis of public private sector wage differentials estimates of the union differential in both public and private sectors allowing for the endogeneity of union status are presented the hypothesis that the recently measured rents to public sector employment primarily reflect the recent increase in unionization in that sector is examined and receives considerable empirical support there was evidence of positive selection into the union sector especially for private sector workers union status appears to be strongly influenced by the expected wage gain from joining the union sector

determinants of charitable donations in canada a comparison over time two issues are examined the statistical significance of a number of socio economic factors that affect the level of charitable giving are evaluated family wealth and age of the head of household tend to be significant determinants of charitable giving regardless of whether it is to all charities or to religious charities only such is not the case for the price of giving for instance the price of giving is an important determinant of all charitable contributions but almost non existent as a determinant for religious donations results such as this suggest that changes in marginal tax rates prompted by a switch to a tax credit as a substitute for a deduction and hence a change in the price of giving may have virtually no impact on contributions to religious organizations but may affect conntributions to other charitable organizations the extent to which some socio economic factors changed in relative importance as determinants of charitable giving from 1982 to 1986 is also reviewed

semiparametric censored regression models aregression model is censored when the recorded data on the dependent variable cuts off outside a certain range with multiple observations at the endpoints of that range when the data are censored variation in the observed dependent variable will understate the effect of the regressors on the true dependent variable as a result standard ordinary least squares regression using censored data will typically result in coefficient estimates that are biased toward zero traditional statistical analysis uses maximum likelihood or related procedures to deal with the problem of censored data however the validity of such methods requires correct specification of the error distribution which can be problematic in practice in the past two decades a number of semiparametric alternatives for dealing with censored data have been proposed in a semiparametric approach part of the functional form of the model usually the regression function is parametrically specified by the researcher based upon plausible assumptions while the rest of the model is not parameterized 1 while the theoretical literature has produced several semiparametric estimators for the censored data model published applications of these estimators to empirical problems in economics have lagged far behind this paper reviews the intuition and computation of a handful of semiparametric estimators proposed for the censored regression model the various estimators are used to examine changes in black white earnings inequality during the

the intergenerational transmission of risk and trust attitudes recent theories endogenize the attitude endowments of individuals assuming that they are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models this paper tests empirically for the relevance of three aspects of the attitude transmission process highlighted in this theoretical literature 1 transmission of attitudes from parents to children 2 an impact of prevailing attitudes in the local environment on child attitudes and 3 positive assortative mating of parents which enhances the ability of a parent to pass on his or her attitudes to the child we focus on two fundamentally important attitudes willingness to take risks and willingness to trust others we find empirical support for all three aspects providing an empirical underpinning for the literature an investigation of underlying mechanisms shows that socialization is important in the transmission process various parental characteristics and aspects of family structure are found to strengthen the socialization process with implications for modeling the socialization production function and for policies focused on affecting children s non cognitive skills the paper also provides evidence that the transmission of risk and trust attitudes affects a wide variety of child outcomes implying a potentially large total effect on children s economic situation

a superior measure of consumption from the panel study of income dynamics abstract this paper provides a simple technique for assigning a measure of total consumption to households in the panel study of income dynamics psid using regressions from the consumer expenditure surveys of 1972 1973 and 1983 linear predictions of total consumption are estimated which are stable over time and explain up to 78 percent of the total variance in consumption

gender differences in earnings among economics and business faculty abstract this research note finds significant earnings differentials across gender that can not be explained by differences in individual job or institutional characteristics specifically we find that female economics and business faculty earn between 1 3 and 7 4 less than would be predicted in the absence of discrimination

imputing a continuous income variable from grouped and missing income observations abstract most cross sectional data sets collect income in a discrete number of categories that is in grouped form to simplify the respondent s task and to encourage a response in spite of such grouped data collection many respondents refuse to provide information on income this paper develops a method to impute a continuous and reliable value for income from grouped and missing income data

an accurate measurement of the crowd out effect income effect and price effect for charitable contributions in the past empirical research on charitable contributions has focused on two issues estimating the income and price elasticities of contributions and estimating the extent to which government funding crowded out private contributions the two fundamental problems in all these studies are the differences in the underlying conceptual models and the use of imperfect data for empirical analysis this paper addresses both of these problems

modeling charitable contributions of time and money abstract public goods theory predicts that government spending on charity can perfectly crowd out charitable contributions empirical research has found little support for the perfect crowd out hypothesis however the empirical work only measures part of a contributor s total contribution gifts of money contributors also volunteer labor this article extends the public goods model to the case in which individuals contribute both time and money to a charity that in turn produces a public good the model suggests that charitable contributions of time and money are perfectly substitutable in equilibrium this result offers new interpretations for existing empirical observations and suggests a new test of the crowd out hypothesis the implications of the model are empirically tested using a national survey of charitable activity

empirical age earnings profiles the human capital earnings function in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics in spite of its widespread acceptance the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience the standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30 50 and overstates midcareer growth by 20 50 however simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available

the charity of the extremely wealthy our experience worldwide is that first generation wealth is actually more generous than dynastic wealth both here in india and u s and other countries the biggest givers are those who are receivers of first generation wealth bill gates quoted in thakur lee and frye 2011 i introduction in this article we study the charitable behavior of billionaires focusing on the impact of the source of their wealth on their charitable donations and pledges while billionaires play a leading role in both the economy and in philanthropy and they are watched closely by journalists and the public at large econometric studies that focus on the behavior of billionaires are rare 1 understanding the charitable behavior of the extremely wealthy is important because they are responsible for a disproportional share of overall giving directly through the amounts of money they give and also because their public status makes their behavior an example for others to follow while the determinants of individual giving have already been studied in experimental settings and using surveys reinstein and riener 2012 steinberg et al 2011 this article documents charitable behavior of a larger magnitude than that typically studied in experiments and of people who do not participate in experiments or fill out surveys 2 our analysis focuses on the question of whether self made billionaires are more charitable than billionaires who inherited their money as bill gates suggested in the quote above it is well documented that people s decisions on how to spend money often depend on how they received that money epley mak and chen idson 2006 for example show that the propensity to consume is bigger if income received is framed as a bonus rather than a rebate arkes et al 1994 show that windfall gains are more readily consumed than nonwindfall gains such evidence has been found both inside and outside the laboratory but in this article we investigate whether treatment of income varies depending on its source when the amounts at stake are much larger than previously studied in the literature in this article amounts range from millions to billions of dollars in comparison with the tens or hundreds of dollars in experimental literature or the tens of thousands of dollars studied in the research on decisions in every day life moreover studies that investigate how spending varies with the source of money typically conclude that earned income is spent more carefully than windfall gains however in the case of charitable giving self made money seems to be more rather than less likely to be spent on charity than inherited money steinberg et al 2011 indeed show using data from the charitable giving module of the panel study of income dynamics psid that the presence of inherited wealth increases giving but also that income held constant an increase in the proportion of income coming from an inheritance is associated with a decrease in charitable giving 3 to study the charitable behavior of the extremely wealthy we use data from the giving pledge a global public pledge to give away at least half of one s fortune during one s lifetime http givingpledge org which by now has been signed by more than 100 extremely wealthy people typically current billionaires in addition we use data on the presence of u s billionaires in the philanthropy top 50 and in the million dollar list a list of those who have given grants of 1 million or more since 2000 we find evidence that self made billionaires are three to four times more likely to sign the giving pledge and to enter the philanthropy top 50 list of biggest pledges compared with those who inherited their wealth at the same time we find that the gap in probabilities between self made and inherited wealth is much smaller at about 28 when looking at the presence in the million dollar list we also find that self made billionaires give more on average than inherited billionaires do when measuring total gifts using the million dollar list or the philanthropy top 50

volunteer labor supply abstract we model the supply of volunteer labor which received an explicit wage of zero quantitatively important it constituted over 5 percent of the entire labor supply in the united states in 1980 both consumption and investment models are considered the former positing volunteering as an ordinary consumer good while the latter posits it as a means of obtaining on the job experience empirical estimation based on survey data discloses statistically significant effects of price and income variables on the supply of volunteer labor

the intergenerational transmission of generosity abstract this paper estimates the correlation between the generosity of parents and the generosity of their adult children using regression models of adult children s charitable giving new charitable giving data are collected in the panel study of income dynamics and used to estimate the regression models the regression models are estimated using a wide variety of techniques and specification tests and the strength of the intergenerational giving correlations is compared with intergenerational correlations in income wealth and consumption expenditure from the same sample using the same set of controls we find the religious giving of parents and children to be strongly correlated as strongly correlated as are their income and wealth the correlation in the secular giving e g giving to the united way educational institutions for poverty relief of parents and children is smaller similar in magnitude to the intergenerational correlation in consumption parents religious giving is positively associated with children s secular giving but in a more limited sense overall the results are consistent with generosity emerging at least in part from the influence of parental charitable behavior in contrast to intergenerational models in which parental generosity towards their children can undo government transfer policy ricardian equivalence these results suggest that parental generosity towards charitable organizations might reinforce government policies such as tax incentives aimed at encouraging voluntary transfers

using cost observation to regulate firms the paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier 1 has superior information about the cost of the project and 2 invests in cost reduction the main result states that under risk neutrality the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns this optimal contract moves toward a fixed price contract as the announced cost decreases an investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate of return regulation is studied

voluntary activities and daily happiness in the united states this article analyzes differences in daily happiness between those individuals in the united states who perform voluntary activities during the day and those who do not using the well being module of the american time use survey 2010 we find that those who devote any time to voluntary activities during the day report higher levels of daily happiness than those who do not comparing the happiness obtained from a range of activities we find that volunteering is among the most enjoyable indicating that time spent on voluntary activities is utility enhancing we document that the effect of voluntary activities on the experienced utility of individuals can be decomposed into a time composition effect and an activity effect with the latter explaining between 11 and 46 of the observed difference jel d13 j16 j22

gender differences in observed and offered wages in canada 1980 according to the 1981 census of canada the female rate of pay is 30 percent less than the male rate the average female wage offer however is only around one half of that received by males other things being equal slightly more than one half of the difference in observed wages can be explained by diffe rences in wage related characteristics between males and females two fifths of the disparity between wage offers can be explained by the same set of factors analysis of the distribution of wage offers indicates greater wage inequality in the canadian labor market than suggested by study of observed wages

what do we know about investment under uncertainty recent theoretical developments relating to investment under uncertainty have highlighted the importance of irreversibility for the timing of investment expenditures and their expected returns this has subsequently stimulated a growing empirical literature which examines uncertainty and threshold effects on investment behaviour this paper presents a review of this literature a variety of methods have been used to investigate the empirical implication of irreversibility in investment the majority focusing on the relationship between investment flows and proxy measures of uncertainty a general conclusion is that increased uncertainty at both aggregate and disaggregate levels leads to lower investment rates this suggests that there is an irreversibility effect under which greater uncertainty raises the value of the call option to delay a commitment to investment this effect appears to dominate any positive impact on investment arising from the fact that greater uncertability under certain circumstances increases the marginal profitability of capital the methods used raise a number of issues which call into question the reliability of the findings and these are addressed in the paper however if such irreversibility effects are present then their omission from traditional investment models casts doubt on the efficacy of such specifications jel classification d81 d92 e22

estimation of semiparametric censored regression models an application to changes in black white earnings inequality during the 1960s building on the work of chay 1995 this study examines the impact of civil rights policies on black economic progress using individual level panel data many earnings records are censored and the degree of censoring changed during the period of interest consequently valid estimates of the program effects must account for this censoring maximum likelihood estimation can be used if the error terms of the model are identically normally distributed we investigate the value of using weaker assumptions on the error process to estimate the laws impact the analysis shows that there was significant black white earnings convergence in the south during the 1960s we also find that semiparametric estimation methods are informative in pinpointing which parts of the model are mis specified

hourly payment and volunteering the effect of organizational practices on decisions about time use we examine how organizational practices making an economic evaluation of time salient such as hourly pay can lead people to spend less time on uncompensated work volunteering using nationally representative survey data in study 1 we showed that with other factors that might affect time decisions controlled people paid by the hour were both less likely to volunteer and spent less time volunteering than counterparts who were not paid hourly study 2 showed that having people calculate their hourly wage was associated with decreased willingness to volunteer and that this experimental manipulation only affected people not paid by the hour because work organizations are typically institutionalized in every sense of that term scott 1995 with their management practices often assuming a taken for granted quality e g zucker 1977 people can learn decision rules and ways of thinking at work that they may then take with them into other spheres of their lives specifically people may develop a particular psychology of time and come to make different decisions about time use depending on the management practices relevant to the evaluation of time to which they are exposed although we believe that management practices and the dimensions of decisions about time that they may affect are many we begin our inquiry by focusing on the effects of hourly payment on the decision to volunteer time we argue that being paid by the hour almost inevitably makes salient an economic frame for the evaluation of time being compensated on an hourly basis predisposes people to assess how they spend their time in terms of the monetary returns from their decisions e g evans barley kunda 2004 we further argue that this monetary or economic frame surrounding time use is particularly relevant for decisions about work and work like activities in this article we focus on volunteering a theoretically important class of work that is freely undertaken without remuneration tilly tilly 1994 because volunteering has been defined as work done without pay it is logical to argue that to the extent that the practice of hourly payment increases the salience of the economic evaluation of time people paid by the hour should be less willing to volunteer and should volunteer less of their time than those not paid by the hour we used a large nationally representative survey with numerous control variables as well as an experiment in which people calculated their hourly wage to illustrate the effect of the framing of compensation on decisions about time use

the evolution of male female earnings differentials in canadian universities 1970 2001 the evolution of academic salaries and the gender earnings gap in canadian universities is analysed using a unique statistics canada data set containing detailed information on all full time teachers at canadian universities over the period 1970 through 2001 male salaries declined across cohorts while female salaries remained stable consequently male female earnings differentials have narrowed recent years have also seen increasing variation in academic salaries for both men and women a gender earnings gap remains the bulk of which can be explained by differences in men s and women s rank and field the unexplained earnings gap has decreased over time on analyse l evolution des salaires et l ecart entre hommes et femmes dans les universites canadiennes entre 1970 et 2001 a l aide d une base de donnees unique de statistiques canada qui contient des renseignements detailles sur tous les professeurs a temps plein des universites canadiennes les salaires des hommes ont decline au fil des cohortes pendant que ceux des femmes demeuraient stables ce qui fait que les differentiels de salaires se sont amenuises au cours des annees recentes on a observe une variabilite croissante des salaires academiques tant pour les hommes que les femmes un ecart entre hommes et femmes persiste qui est attribuable aux differences dans les rangs et dans les champs d activites des hommes et des femmes l ecart qui demeure inexplique a diminue dans le temps

volunteerism and crowding out canadian econometric evidence volunteers make an important contribution to canadian society the authors address what motivates people to volunteer and whether they respond to government expenditure decisions using a 1987 microdata set and find that while the level of government spending influences the decision to volunteer it has no effect on the number of hours donated furthermore the nature of this relationship depends upon the particular type of government expenditures for instance the number of volunteers contracts when expenditures on certain economy related activities fall while reductions in health care spending bring about an increased number of volunteers

the impact of charitable subsidies on religious giving and attendance evidence from panel data the literature documents that charitable giving is responsive to tax subsidies but often ignores the spillover effects of such policies this paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on religious participation using individual level panel data the results show that religious giving and participation are complements the implied cross price elasticity of religious participation with respect to the after tax price of giving is 0 27 furthermore a 1 increase in the amount of religious contributions is associated with a 0 4 increase in religious attendance these results are robust under several different specifications and highlight the positive externalities created by charitable subsidies

social networks and private philanthropy abstract a theoretical model is provided in which an individual s social network enhances the consumption benefits from the public good we find conditions under which investments in network enhancing infrastructure would encourage individuals to donate time and money to charity an empirical investigation of the link between networks and private philanthropy is undertaken using the canadian national survey of giving volunteering and participating we find strong evidence that networks promote donations of time and money

the payoff to work without pay volunteer work as an investment in human capital despite the widespread belief that volunteer work enhances an individual s employment prospects the hypothesis that volunteer work increases one s earnings has

salary differentials by sex in the academic labor market this paper examines faculty time allocation decisions that are fundamental to the functioning of a university a random utility approach yields a grouped data multinomial logit model and predicts that time allocation decisions depend systematically on

updating estimates of male female salary differentials in the academic labor market abstract i estimate the male female salary gap and salary discrimination for faculty between the years 1968 and 1989 estimates of both these quantities fell substantially in the 1970 s with no further improvement in 1984 and 1989

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

pareto optimal redistribution and private charity abstract when private charity exists and is motivated by utility interdependence a non pareto optimal outcome the free rider problem typically arises nevertheless incremental fiscal redistribution cannot achieve a paretian welfare improvement so long as private charity continues at positive levels donors respond to incremental fiscal redistribution by reducing their voluntary contributions by exactly a dollar for every dollar transferred in this way no net transfer is achieved unless incremental fiscal redistribution is pursued to the point where private contributions have been driven to zero alternatively a net transfer may be achieved by fiscal measures which affect donors marginal incentives to donate

the attrition of volunteers abstract we apply a flexible hazard rate model to analyze the attrition rate of volunteers with the belgian red cross our modeling framework handles right censored and left filtered observations incorporates covariates makes an adjustment for unobserved heterogeneity and estimates the baseline hazard non parametrically two of our findings are of serious concern to the red cross administrators first the expected length of stay becomes smaller for the more recent entrants second the conditional quitting probability does not decrease but rather increases with the volunteer s length of service