Charitable Contributions of Time and Money



by James Andreoni, William G. Gale and John Karl Scholz



This paper is the first study to use a representative national sample and utility maximizing framework to

examine the joint determination of charitable contributions and volunteer labor.  We begin by describing a

simple theoretical framework for analyzing a household's decisions about philanthropic activity.  We

examine these predictions using data collected in 1990 by the Gallup Organization for Independent Sector. 

The Independent Sector survey contains detailed information on hours volunteered, cash contributions, as

well as a variety of economic and demographic variables. To examine the substitutability of gifts of time

and money we estimate a version of the analytic model  Our framework allows individual characteristics to

affect the amount of income devoted to altruistic activities and to affect the relative preference between gifts

of time and money.