Nber Working Paper Series the Importance of Being Marginal: Gender Differences in Generosity

Do men and women have different social preferences? Previous findings are contradictory. We provide a potential explanation using evidence from a field experiment. In a door-to-door solicitation, men and women are equally generous, but women become less generous when it becomes easy to avoid the solicitor. Our structural estimates of the social preference parameters suggest an explanation: women are more likely to be on the margin of giving, partly because of a less dispersed distribution of altruism. We find similar results for the willingness to complete an unpaid survey: women are more likely to be on the margin of participation. Stefano DellaVigna University of California, Berkeley Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 and NBER [email protected] John A. List Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Chicago, IL 60637 and NBER [email protected] Ulrike Malmendier Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall # 3880 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 and NBER [email protected] Gautam Rao Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall # 3880 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 [email protected]