Charitable giving and charitable gambling: An empirical investigation

Recent decades have witnessed a rapid increase in charitable gaming. Some have suggested that this means that conventional donations to charity will fall. In this paper, we use a rich Canadian data set to examine the relationship between direct contributions to charities and those made indirectly via charitable games. We find that individuals consider these two ways of giving as complementary to each other. Rather than leading to a reduction in conventional donations, direct donations may increase with the increase in charitable lotteries.