Giving it away: charitable donations to overseas disasters

The services and activities provided by the COOL RDC are made possible by the financial or in-kind support of the SSHRC, the CIHR, the CFI, Statistics Canada, Carleton University, the University of Ottawa and the Université du Québec en Outaouais. [...] One of the earlier contributions to the empirical literature on international giving is Ribar and Wilhelm (1995) who examine giving to international relief and development in the United States. [...] To get a sense of how the presence of a natural disaster affected the amounts and distribution of charitable donations across these different categories, we also examined the CSGVP results for the 2007 survey. [...] The main part of the analysis is an econometric examination of whether individuals contribute to international causes and disaster relief, how much they give, and what share of their charitable contributions go to international and disaster relief causes. [...] The reported means suggest that relative to others, donors to international and disaster relief causes are more likely to have higher incomes, have more education, to be female, to volunteer or have admired volunteers, to give a higher share of donations to social service causes than other domestic charities, to be religious, be non-Canadian born or a recent immigrant, and to live in an urban area.