Raising charitable children: the effects of verbal socialization and role-modeling on children’s giving

This paper uses nationally-representative data from the PSID and CDS to estimate the causal effects of two parent socialization actions—talking to children about giving and role-modeling—on children’s decisions whether or not to give to charity. We develop an identification framework based on the intra-household allocation and cultural transmission literatures that shows how different assumptions about parental response to time-varying unobserved changes in children’s prosocial values can be combined with the child fixed effects estimate and the difference between siblings’ over-time-differences estimate to infer a bound on the causal effect of parental action to socialize their children. Under the identifying assumption we think is most reasonable for socializing the willingness to give to charity, that parents treat the socialization actions of others as cultural substitutes, our estimates imply that talking to children about giving raises the probability of children’s giving by at least .13. We find no evidence that parental role-modeling affects children’s giving, except among non-African-American girls. The identification framework and substantive results have implications for those with a general interest in using data from naturalistic settings to estimate causal effects of parental socialization actions, those interested in the external validity of laboratory findings, and those interested in the socialization of warm glow

Tourism and quality of life: How does tourism measure up?

This chapter reviews and analyzes the contribution that tourism development makes to quality-of-life (QOL). The chapter commences with a review of the sociocultural, economic, and environmental effects of tourism development as it relates to QOL. It will be argued that tourism studies have generally relied on observations and measurement by researchers, who have explored residents’ perceived impacts of tourism on their community. In contrast to community-centric impact studies, this chapter is concerned with how economic, social, and environmental impacts of tourism are manifested and how tourism is contributing to QOL and overall life satisfaction. An importance-performance analysis (IPA) is used to achieve this goal. The opinions of experts in tourism development are used as a basis for identifying the importance of 45 attributes of QOL and for assessing how well tourism performs on each. The literature review, analysis, and findings indicate that tourism has the potential to contribute to enhanced QOL through economic benefits, but this can be at the expense of social equity, cultural identity, and environmental sustainability. There is also considerable room for improvement in tourism’s performance with respect to contributing to local communities and provision of leadership and corporate social responsibility as they relate to the key attributes of QOL in tourism destinations. Research propositions emerging from the findings could inform the future direction of inquiry into the complex relationships and interdependencies between tourism, QOL, and the well-being of both tourists and the communities they visit