Charity and the Bequest Motive: Evidence from Seventeenth‐Century Wills
通过分析17世纪英国萨福克郡的遗嘱，研究慈善遗赠的动机，发现财富、宗教虔诚和子女数量影响捐赠，但捐赠给家庭外的人与简单利他模型矛盾，支持慈善行为受社会认可驱动的模型。
This paper researches motivations for charitable bequests by looking at gifts to the poor in wills written in Suffolk, England, in the 1620s and 1630s. The findings that wealthier and more religious individuals and those with fewer children give more to the poor support an altruistic model of testator utility. However, the result that individuals who give to more people outside of their immediate families are more likely to give to the poor contradicts the simple altruism model. This result is consistent with a model that suggests that charitable giving is partially driven by the approbation granted to charitable behavior.