Who Gives? The Determinants of Charitable Giving, Volunteering, and Their Relationship

Charity organizations often have limited resources and thus rely on individual contributions of money and time. The existing literature is divided on whether charitable giving and volunteering are complements or substitutes. This paper aims to clarify the relationship between giving time and giving money using 2012 General Social Survey results and to explore whether certain demographical attributes affect donating, volunteering, and the relationship between donations and volunteerism. A correlation test determines that the frequencies of giving time and giving money are complements (r = .3777). In addition to multiple and binomial logit regressions, a multinomial logit regression shows that a combination of income, age, marital status and sex, religion, number of children, political party affiliation, and self-rank of social position significantly affect the complementarity between donating and volunteering.