RSSE: Mikael Elinder (Uppsala University) The effects of cancer experience on charitable giving (co-authors: Oscar Erixson, Xiao Hu and Zunyu)

It is our pleasure that Mikael Elinder (Uppsala University) will present on Thursday, May 7, 2026, at 12:45 in room RB437 about the topic “The effects of cancer experience on charitable giving (co-authors: Oscar Erixson, Xiao Hu, and Zunyu)”.

Registration is not required and anyone who would like to attend is warmly invited.

It is also possible to participate online via MS Teams at this link. In case of any connection issues, please contact lubomir.cingl@vse.cz.

ABSTRACT: Private donations are an important source of funding for medical research and patient care, yet little is known about how personal experiences shape these contributions. We provide the first population-level causal evidence on how exposure to severe illness affects private provision of public goods. Using Swedish administrative data linking individual donations to health and medical records, we exploit variation in cancer diagnosis timing within a difference-in-differences framework to examine how such shocks affect charitable giving among patients and their families across three generations. Event-study estimates show that both personal illness and relatives’ diagnoses substantially increase donations to cancer charities, with effects persisting for at least three years. The responses are highly cause-specific: giving to cancer charities rises while donations to other domains decline or remain unchanged, reflecting both a reallocation and an overall expansion in giving. The findings indicate that personal experiences can reshape the composition and level of private contributions to public goods.

BIO: Mikael Elinder is Professor in the Department of economics, Uppsala University, and Director of Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies. His research is mostly interdisciplinary and empirical. He has published papers on behavior related to various topics, such as: inheritances, charitable giving, public health, voting, disasters, pensions, the housing market, energy consumption, as well as on trust, inequality, and public finances. His current focus is on: health, giving behavior, intelligence, and prediction models in the health care sector.