Charitable Giving by Married Couples: Who Decides and Why Does It Matter?
研究家庭中谁主要负责捐赠决策如何影响慈善行为，发现已婚家庭的总捐赠倾向于丈夫偏好，但女性决策者会将捐款分配给更多慈善机构、每家更少。
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.However, 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.We find our results give new insights into both issues of charitable giving and household decision making.For prominant examples theoretical models of household bargaining, see McElroy and Horney (1981), and 1 Lundberg and Pollak (1993).For empirical comparisons on the "unitary" household model of Becker (1981) and the bargaining models, see, for instance, Schultz (1990), Thomas (1990), Hoddinott and Haddad (1995), Haddad and Hoddinott (1994), Lundberg, Pollak and Wales (1997), and Browning and Chiaporri (1998).Lundberg and Pollak (1996) provide an excellent synthesis of this literature, and Alderman, et al. (1995) makes a case to favor a bargaining approach.It is also interesting to note that males and females have been found to differ on altruism exhibited in experiments.2 See Andreoni and Vesterlund (1998).2 characterized by bargaining between spouses with different tastes and talents.Still, much more 1 remains to be learned about how households make decisions and how compromises are formed.Research on charitable giving has also been active, but the approach to households has not taken into account the newer view that bargaining rather than benevolence characterizes household decisions.With the growing economic power of women, their voice is being heard more loudly by charities and fund-raisers.In addition, there is evidence that their tastes could be quite different from their husband's.For instance, Eller (1997), in a recent study of estate tax data, reports that 37.6 percent of the amount bequeathed by men went to private foundations, while women directed only 18.7 percent of their charity to such groups.Women gave 14.3 percent of their estates to religious organizations, in contrast to just 5.4 percent by men.Educational, medical, and scientific organizations drew 34.5 percent of women's charitable bequests but only 21.5 percent of men's.These differences in the allocation of gifts were far more dramatic than differences in the overall level of philanthropy: male donors contributed 26.7 percent of their net worth, and women gave 27.6 percent of theirs.If men and women differ so in their estate giving, they are also likely to have conflicting notions of how to allocate annual giving.How are these conflicts resolved?How will the landscape of giving change as women 2 gain more power in the market and within the household?