The Impact of Public Assistance Use on Charitable Giving: Evidence from the USA and China

Public policy can directly or indirectly affect private philanthropy. Although previous studies have investigated the role of tax incentives and government grants to nonprofits, scholars do not pay much attention to how public welfare receipt affects philanthropic behavior. This study fills the gap by examining the impact of public assistance use on individual charitable giving using data from the USA and China. We employ propensity score matching to reduce the issue of selection bias and adopt logistic regression and the Tobit model to answer our research question. Our analysis demonstrates the different impacts of public assistance use on charitable giving in the two countries. In the USA, public assistance income is negatively associated with secular giving, and prior public assistance use is negatively related to religious and total giving. However, in China, there is no statistically significant relationship between public assistance use and charitable giving.