Simultaneous Determination of Church Contributions and Church Attendance

In a standard model of household allocation of time and income, church attendance and church contributions are determined simultaneously. There are life‐cycle aspects to both attendance and contributions, as Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975) and Ehrenberg (1977) have argued, and contributions behavior is affected by tax treatment and by a potential free‐rider problem as well. This paper motivates an econometric specification which recognizes these features and estimates the parameters with a data set of over 2000 Protestant church members.