Z:gnu-www-ja-frank--3fd974-An examination of economists'/en

An examination of economists' gifts to other charities revealed that their median annual gift is actually slightly larger, in absolute terms, than the median for all disciplines taken as a whole. But because economists have significantly higher salaries than do the members of most other disciplines, these data, like the data shown in Figures 2 and 3, tend to overstate the relative generosity of economists. Unfortunately, we do not have direct income measures for the respondents in our survey, but we do have the number of years each respondent has been a practitioner in his or her discipline. In an attempt to take income effects into account, we estimated earnings functions (salary vs. years of experience) for each discipline using data from a large private university. We then applied the estimated coefficients from these earnings functions to the experience data from our survey to impute an income estimate for each respondent in our survey. Finally, we used these imputed income figures, together with our respondents' reports of their total charitable giving to estimate the relationship between income and total giving shown in Figure 4. In the latter exercise, all economists were dropped from the sample on the grounds that our object was to see whether the giving pattern of economists deviates from the pattern we see for other disciplines.