This website uses cookies.

By clicking the "Accept" button or continuing to browse our site, you agree to first-party and session-only cookies being stored on your device to enhance site navigation and analyze site performance and traffic. For more information on our use of cookies, please see our Privacy Policy.

  1. Home
  2. ASSA Annual Meeting
  3. 2026
  4. Preliminary Program
  5. Charitable Giving and Social Justice
« Back to Results

Charitable Giving and Social Justice

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EST)

Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
Hosted By: Association for the Study of Generosity in Economics
  • Chair: Erzo Luttmer, Dartmouth College

Legal Assistance for Evictions: Impacts, Mechanisms, and Demand

Aviv Caspi
,
Stanford University
Charlie Rafkin
,
University of British Columbia

Abstract

An active policy debate concerns whether to provide free legal counsel to tenants in eviction
cases. We randomize provision of attorneys to tenants facing eviction in Memphis, Tennessee
(N = 307 attorneys provided). Despite landlord-friendly eviction law, providing an attorney
reduces tenant eviction judgment rates within 180 days by 23 percentage points (37%). How
ever, attorneys’ effects persist only when they can connect tenants to other services. Once
a concurrent emergency rental assistance program expires, effects on judgments at 180 days
shrink by about 75% and are indistinguishable from zero. Incentivized surveys suggest ten
ants’ demand for an attorney is double attorneys’ price, and eight times attorneys’ implied
impacts on tenants’ incomes via stopping evictions. This high willingness to pay does not ap
pear to result from elicitation errors, misperceptions, or binding budget constraints. We con
trast lawyers’ Marginal Value of Public Funds from using elicited willingness to pay (MVPF
= 2.7 without rental assistance, ignoring impacts on landlords or general equilibrium) versus
a standard calibrated approach (MVPF = 0.3) and discuss implications for the evaluation of
policies involving in-kind goods.

Affective Altruism

Jenny Chang
,
Carnegie Mellon University
George Loewenstein
,
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

Sympathy plays a powerful role in driving prosocial behavior, but it often does not align with the severity of the circumstances. We investigate how vividness can drive a wedge between emotional sympathy and cognitive appraisals of a victim’s circumstances. Specifically, we examine two key pathways through which vividness may amplify emotional responses relative to appraisals: a) personal experience—the extent to which an observer can relate to a target’s suffering based on their own experiences, and b) visibility—how externally perceptible a target’s suffering is to others. Across five pre-registered online studies (total N=4,202), we find that personal experience and externally visible conditions elicit greater sympathy, even when cognitive appraisals of severity remain relatively unchanged. Importantly, visibility has less impact among those with personal experience, suggesting that personal relevance may render the situation vivid even in the absence of external cues. Furthermore, in two incentive-compatible experiments, we show that vividness increases charitable giving through amplified sympathy, rather than through changes in cognitive appraisals. Together, our results shed light on factors that lead us to be more sympathetic to a victim’s plight, often independent of appraisals of objective need.

Mispricing Narratives after Social Unrest

Bocar Ba
,
Duke University
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
,
New York University
Roman G. Rivera
,
University of California-Berkeley
Alexander Whitefield
,
University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

We study how negative sentiment around an industry impacts beliefs and behaviors, focusing on demands for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd and the salience of the “defund the police” movement. We assess stakeholder beliefs on the impact of protests on the stock prices of police-affiliated firms. In our survey experiment, laypeople and finance professionals predicted more negative stock price outcomes when they lacked details on the products supplied by such firms. Exposure to narratives about the context of the protests further reduced the prediction accuracy of these groups. In contrast, product information improved the prediction accuracy of respondents. Turning to real-life behavior, we find that mutual funds exposed to protests were 20% less likely to hold police stocks, after the protests, than funds in areas without protests. Political support for maintaining police funding, though in the majority, declined by 4.3 percentage points in protest areas. The salience of the “defund the police” narrative led to significant overreactions in both financial predictions and real-life behavior.

Welfare Analysis with Nonlinear Budget Sets and Evidence from a Large Charitable Fundraising Experiment

Marco Castillo
,
Texas A&M University
Ragan Petrie
,
Texas A&M University

Abstract

The compensating variation of a subsidy requires knowing an individual's preference over the choice set without a subsidy and the choice set with the subsidy and a reduced income. We show how to identify these preferences directly using nonlinear budgets and estimate the average excess burden of a subsidy. Our approach affords heterogeneity and is applicable when differential methods are difficult to implement, i.e. when subsidies create notches. We illustrate the approach in a large field experiment with charities using threshold matches that pay a fixed subsidy to the charity when a donation exceeds a threshold. Threshold matches cost-effectively increased out-of-pocket donations, but the excess burden of the subsidy increased in the threshold level. The excess burden of a \$500 threshold match is about 45c per dollar of subsidy, whereas this is 9c for a \$25 threshold match. We assess the desirability of threshold incentives against alternative subsidies.

Discussant(s)
Marianne Andries
,
University of Southern California
Emma Rackstraw
,
Swarthmore College
Colin Sullivan
,
University of Pittsburgh
Sarah Smith
,
University of Bristol
JEL Classifications
  • H0 - General
  • I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty