Altruism from the house: the impact of home equity on charitable giving

This paper exploits the dramatic increase in house prices in early 2000 and the panel nature of the data to investigate the effect of home equity on charitable giving. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 2001 to 2007, we find that a 10% increase in home equity increases a household’s contributions to charity by almost 1%. This is in contrast to the effect of non-housing wealth, which we estimate to be one tenth the magnitude. Our results are consistent with the consumption literature that reports a distinct effect of housing wealth that is significantly larger than that of financial wealth.