Specification of the Joy of Giving: Insights from Altruism

Andrew Abel and Mark Warshawsky

No 2154, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper analyzes the joy of giving bequest motive in which the utility obtained from leaving a bequest depends only on the size of the bequest. It exploits the fact that this formulation can be interpreted as a reduced form of an altruistic bequest motive to derive a relation between the value of the altruism parameter and the value of the joy of giving parameter. Using previous discussions of an a priori range of plausible values for the altruism parameter we then derive plausible restrictions on the joy of giving parameter. We demonstrate that this parameter may well be orders of magnitude larger than assumed in the existing literature.

Date: 1987-02
Note: ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 70, No. 1, February 1988, pp. 145- 149.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2154.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Specification of the Joy of Giving: Insights from Altruism
Working Paper: Specification of the Joy of Giving: Insights from Altruism
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:nbr:nberwo:2154

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2154

Access Statistics for this paper

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