The economics of altruism: The old,the rich,the female

This study examines whether people of different observed characteristics exhibit different degree of altruism. The article utilizes a National Mental Health Survey that gathered questions about respondents’ self-reported altruism along with their demographic, labor force, and income information. The empirical results revealed the following: (1) Older people are more altruistic. This could potentially be explained by the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) that the older people shift towards emotion-related goals that can be internally rewarding in the present. (2) Higher-income people are more altruistic. This could potentially be explained by the fact that higher-income people could better afford to be more altruistic compared to lower-income people. (3) Women are more altruistic. This could potentially be explained by either biological evolution or social imposition. The main results are robust once the potential endogeneity problem of the income variable is mitigated by the use of the instrumental variable estimation method.