Sharing One's Fortune? An Experimental Study on Earned Income and Giving

Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos

No 7294, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the relationship between earnings and charitable giving. We set up a real effort experiment, in which subjects enter data in four one-hour occasions and are paid a piece rate. From the second occasion onwards, we randomly assign half of the subjects to a treatment with higher piece rates. At the end we ask subjects whether they want to donate a share of their earnings to a charity of their choice. We find that, despite large differences in earnings due to the different piece rates, subjects receiving the higher piece rate are actually less likely to give, and that givers in the two groups give the same share of their total earnings. Charities receive the same average donation from members of the two groups indicating that subjects in this experiment do not treat charitable giving as a normal good.

Keywords: charity; earnings; luck; effort; windfall (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 J39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2017, 66, 112-118

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7294.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sharing one’s fortune? An experimental study on earned income and giving (2017)
Working Paper: Sharing One's Fortune? An Experimental Study on Earned Income and Giving (2013)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7294

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().