Religious identity and altruistic giving: A field experiment with children in India

 Pooja Balasubramanian,  Daniel Celis  and Marcela Ibanez

 This paper reports a field experiment that studies altruistic motivations among children living in Mumbai. The main experimental design and procedure follow Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. (2017).  Each subject makes donation decisions given a set of budgets with different endowments to the participant and the recipient, allowing us to and structurally estimate the strength of warm-glow and pure altruism in participants' motivation for giving. In addition, the experiment examines the effect of religious identity by varying the identity of beneficiaries and donors (Hindu or Muslim pupils). Finally, we elicit the warm-glow and the pure altruistic preference of the parents via survey-based experiments.

We find that warm-glow is the most important motivation for giving. Yet, when the beneficiary's identity is salient, pure altruistic preferences gain importance. Around teenage children (14 years old) display distinguishable motivations for giving to in-group and out-groups. Other factors such as religiosity and father's altruistic giving is positively correlated with the relative degree of warm-glow giving.