Altruism and the Child-Cycle of Alumni Giving

Jonathan Meer and Harvey Rosen ()

No 13152, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper uses a unique data set to assess whether donors' contributions to a nonprofit institution are affected by the perception that the institution might confer a reciprocal benefit. We study alumni contributions to an anonymous research university. Inter alia, the data include information on the ages of the alumni's children, whether they applied for admission to the university, and if so, whether they were accepted. The premise of our analysis is simple: If alumni believe that donations will increase the likelihood of admission for their children and if this belief helps motivate their giving, then the pattern of giving should vary systematically with the ages of their children, whether the children ultimately apply to university, and the outcome of the admissions process. We refer to this pattern as the child-cycle of alumni giving. If the child-cycle is operative, one would observe that, ceteris paribus, the presence of children increases the propensity to give, that giving drops off after the admissions decision is made, and that the decline is greater when the child is rejected by the university. Further, under the joint hypothesis that alumni can reasonably predict the likelihood that their children will someday apply to the university and that reciprocity in the form of a higher probability of admission is expected, we expect that alumni with children in their early teens who eventually apply will give more than alumni whose teenagers do not. The evidence is strongly consistent with the child-cycle pattern. Thus, while altruism drives some giving, the hope for a reciprocal benefit plays a role as well. Using our results, we compute rough estimates of the proportion of giving due to selfish motives.

JEL-codes: H49 I22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-06
Note: ED PE

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13152.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13152

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13152
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().