Z:gnu-www-ja-frank--91907b-Using the relationship between/en

Using the relationship between charitable giving and income, we calculated the expected gift for each respondent as a function of his or her imputed income. We then calculated our measure of a discipline's generosity as the ratio of the average value of gifts actually reported by members of the discipline to the average value of gifts expected on the basis of the members' imputed incomes. A discipline is thus more generous than expected if this ratio exceeds 1.0, and less generous if it is less than 1.0. The computed ratio for economists was 0.91, which means that economists in our sample gave 91 percent as much as they would have been expected to give on the basis of their imputed incomes. The performance of economists by this measure is compared with the performance of other disciplines in Figure 5.