This paper presents the results from a field experiment which varies the amount of information seen by two million job seekers when viewing 100,000 job postings on a large online job posting website. The information seen is the true number of people who previously started an application. This...

Philanthropy is one of the enduring areas of economic research. Why would people work hard only to give their earnings away? The paper explores the theoretical foundations, as well as the empirical and policy research on philanthropy. This paper reviews over 25 years worth of economic research,...

We study three different models in which public goods are supplied by private contributions. In one of these models, tax-financed government subsidies to private contributions will definitely increase the equilibrium supply of public goods. In the other two models, government subsidies are...

We study gender differences in altruism by examining a modified dictator game with varying incomes and prices. Our results indicate that the question "which is the fair sex?" has a complicated answer--when altruism is expensive, women are kinder, but when it is cheap, men are more altruistic....

Using 10-year neighborhood-level panels derived from personal tax records in Canada, we find that local ethnic and religious diversity are inversely related to charitable donations. A 10 percentage point increase in ethnic diversity is associated with a 14% reduction in donations. The same...