Abstract: While fundraising platforms universally display progress toward campaign goals, little is known about whether these metrics motivate or discourage charitable giving. Using controlled experiments, I demonstrate that goal gradient effects operate asymmetrically: campaigns at 30% progress experience a 15.1 percentage point reduction in donation probability relative to control conditions without goal framing, while campaigns at 80% progress show no significant increase. This asymmetry operates through reduced warm glow utility, with donors anticipating less satisfaction from supporting campaigns distant from arbitrary targets. Mediation analysis reveals that goal distance reduces both anticipated emotional rewards and personal cause valuation without affecting beliefs about social valuations. A second experiment with comparative choice shows that goal framing redirects donations toward less funded causes without affecting overall donation likelihood, suggesting activation of pure altruism considerations about marginal impact. These findings reconcile conflicting evidence on goal gradient effects and demonstrate that progress metrics may inadvertently discourage giving when campaigns appear far from targets while providing minimal benefits near completion.
Abstract: This paper examines the dynamics of charitable giving in online fundraising campaigns, focusing on the interplay between goal gradient effects, strategic complementarities, and social media visibility. Using high-frequency data from over 14,000 GoFundMe campaigns, I document several patterns that challenge traditional models of charitable giving. Contrary to the goal gradient hypothesis, donation rates do not systematically increase as campaigns approach their targets. Instead, I find strong positive autocorrelation in donation behavior, with this relationship weakening as campaigns progress. To address potential endogeneity concerns, I exploit exogenous variation from social media platform outages and local sports events, which temporarily disrupt the visibility mechanism while leaving donor preferences unchanged. This identification strategy allows me to disentangle strategic complementarities in giving from the correlation in social media exposure.
with J. Landin Smith
Abstract: We examine how religious networks influenced migration patterns during The Great Migration (1900-1940), when approximately six million African Americans moved from the rural South to urban areas in the North and West. Using a novel dataset that combines U.S. Census data and the Census of Religious Bodies, we analyze the relationship between religious similarity and county-to-county migration flows. We find that locations with greater religious similarity experienced significantly higher migration flows, with a one standard deviation increase in religious similarity associated with a 6 percentage point increase in migration rates. These findings contribute to our understanding of how religious institutions, which served as crucial economic and social organizations in African American communities, facilitated one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history.