Specification of the Joy of Giving: Insights from Altruism / Andrew B. Abel, Mark Warshawsky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Abel, Andrew B.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Warshawsky, Mark.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w2154.

NBER working paper series no. w2154

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Altruism--Economic aspects.

Altruism.

Inheritance and succession.

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Specification of the Joy of Giving

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1987.

Cambridge, Mass. : National Bureau of Economic Research, 1987.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

February 1987.