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In this paper, we estimate a sample-selection system of equations in a joint analysis of volunteering, religious giving, and secular giving using data on working households from the 2005 Center on Philanthropy Panel Study and Panel Study on Income Dynamics. Estimated tax price elasticities suggest that changes in the tax treatment of charitable contributions could lead to substantial reductions in monetary donations. For example, replacing the deduction with a 12 percent tax credit available to all tax filers in 2005 would have increased religious and secular contributions from working households by 7.7 and 3.8 percent, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the question of whether differences in four structural models of charitable behavior make any difference to the findings regarding the major determinants of philanthropic contributions is addressed. Using data from Independent Sector’s Giving and Volunteering Survey, giving and volunteering equations using the standard Tobit model, the “Heckit” model, the Cragg model with uncorrelated errors, and the Cragg model with correlated errors are estimated. Results indicate that the generalized two-stage approaches are far superior to the standard Tobit model for both monetary donations and volunteer time. For monetary giving, parameter estimates of the second-stage contribution equations are similar across the three alternative two-stage methods and there is no evidence of correlation between the first- and second-stage error terms. Second-stage estimates for volunteering from the Heckit and Cragg models with correlated errors are also similar and offer compelling evidence of correlated error terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]