A study on the influence of personality characteristics on household charitable donation behavior in China

Using the data of the 2018 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper empirically tests the impact of the Big Five personality characteristics on household charitable donation behavior. The benchmark regression results show that after controlling the individual characteristics and family characteristics of the household heads, the conscientiousness and openness of the household heads have a significant positive impact on the social donation behavior of the family. On this basis, this paper takes the openness personality as an example, selects the identification strategy of processing effect, and tests the robustness of the causal effect of personality on household donation behavior. The openness personality has a significant positive impact on household external donation behavior. In the further study, it is found that with the improvement of the level of household charitable donation, the positive effect of the household head 's openness personality on household charitable donation behavior is gradually weakening; The influence of openness personality on household charitable donation has the nonlinear characteristics of marginal effect increasing and obvious life cycle characteristics.

Automated summary

Using the data from the 2018 China Family Panel Studies, this paper examines the influence of the Big Five personality traits on household charitable donations. The results show that conscientiousness and openness of the household head have a significant positive impact on social donations. The study also finds that the positive effect of openness on charitable donations weakens as the level of household donations increases, and this effect exhibits nonlinear and life-cycle characteristics.