What is the Real Relationship between Income and Charitable Giving?

Many studies have focused on the relationship between income and charitable donations either by comparing income and percentage of income donated to construct a “giving curve” or by calculating the income elasticity of giving. In this article, the authors relate these two types of studies to one another, using 1997 Consumer Expenditure Survey data. They show that giving curves and elasticity models measure different phenomena and investigate ways that the information in each might be combined to enrich future studies of charitable giving.