EVIDENCE-BASED RESEARCH ON CHARITABLE GIVING

The Importance of Being Marginal: Gender Differences in Generosity

     This paper was published in American Economic Review in 2013

    Stefano DellaVigna, John A. List, Ulrike Malmendier, Gautam Rao

    University of California-Berkeley, NBER
    University of Chicago, NBER
    University of California-Berkeley, NBER
    Microsoft Research

Abstract:
Do men and women have different social preferences? Previous findings are contradictory. We provide a potential explanation using evidence from a field experiment. In a door-to-door solicitation, men and women are equally generous, but women become less generous when it becomes easy to avoid the solicitor. Our structural estimates of the social preference parameters suggest an explanation: women are more likely to be on the margin of giving, partly because of a less dispersed distribution of altruism. We find similar results for the willingness to complete an unpaid survey: women are more likely to be on the margin of participation.