Brown, S. and Taylor, K. (2015) Charitable Behaviour and the Big Five Personality Traits: Evidence from UK Panel Data. Working Paper. Sheffield Economic Research Paper Series (SERPS), 201517 (201501). Department of Economics, University of Sheffield ISSN 1749-8368
Abstract
This paper investigates the association between personality traits and charitable behaviour, namely donations of time and money, using data from Understanding Society, the most recent large scale UK longitudinal household survey. Due to the censored nature of the outcome variables, i.e. some individuals do not engage in charitable behaviour, we employ tobit and censored quantile regression models. Personality traits are classified according to the ‘Big Five’ taxonomy: openness to experience; conscientiousness; extraversion; agreeableness; and neuroticism. In general, after conditioning on an extensive set of controls, conscientiousness and neuroticism are found to be inversely related to donating time and money, whilst openness to experience, which has a positive effect, is the dominant trait in terms of magnitude. Interestingly, personality traits are found to have a stronger correlation with donations of time and money at the extreme points of the distribution of donations relative to that at the median, thereby highlighting the additional information revealed by the quantile approach.
Metadata
Item Type: | Monograph |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | The Sheffield Economic Research Paper Series (SERPS) offers a forum for the research output of the Department of Economics, University of Sheffield. Papers are reviewed for quality and presentation by two internal referees and a departmental editor. However, the contents and opinions expressed remain the responsibility of the author(s). Comments are welcomed and should be addressed to the individual author(s). |
Keywords: | Charitable donations; Volunteering; Personality traits; Tobit model; Censored quantile regression |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Economics (Sheffield) > Sheffield Economics Research Papers Series |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 27 Jan 2016 16:53 |
Last Modified: | 27 Jan 2016 16:53 |
Published Version: | https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/research/ser... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Department of Economics, University of Sheffield |
Series Name: | Sheffield Economic Research Paper Series (SERPS) |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:88647 |