An Accurate Measurement of the Crowd-out Effect, Income Effect, and Price Effect for Charitable Contributions

In the past, empirical research on charitable contributions has focused on two issues: estimating the income and price elasticities of contributions and estimating the extent to which government funding crowded out private contributions. The two fundamental problems in all these studies are the differences in the underlying conceptual models and the use of imperfect data for empirical analysis. This paper addresses both of these problems.