Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
883436 | Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization | 2016 | 13 Pages |
•We report a field study involving 2,664 callers to a legal call centre.•We tested a weak ask prompting people to leave money to charity in their will.•We also tested a strong ask with additional social/emotional factors.•The strong ask had a significant effect relative to the weak ask.•Most of the response was driven by people without children.
We report the findings of a field study demonstrating the importance of non-pecuniary mechanisms for bequest giving. We show that a prompt to leave money to charity that includes social/emotional factors made during the will-making process increases by 50 per cent the proportion of wills that include a charitable bequest. In terms of magnitude, we show that this is one-third of the effect of a 40% estates tax at the threshold. We find little response to either prompts or tax-price changes among people with children indicating that, for many, leaving money to their children appears to preclude leaving money to charity.