We thank the audiences for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks to various colleagues who provided articles we could not find and who clarified their findings. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees of NVSQ for useful comments. Thanks to Esra Dursun and Barry Hoolwerf for research assistance.

This is the first of two articles in which we present a comprehensive review of the multi-disciplinary academic literature on philanthropy, identifying the predictors of charitable giving. For each predictor, we discuss the evidence for the mechanisms that may explain why the predictor is correlated with giving. We conclude with a brief agenda for future research. In this first article we present the evidence on the relationship of giving with religion, education, age, and socialization.

This is the second of two articles in which we present a comprehensive review of the multidisciplinary academic literature on philanthropy. In this article, we identify the following predictors of charitable giving by individuals and/or households: gender, family composition and income. For each predictor, we discuss the evidence for the mechanisms that may explain why the predictor is correlated with giving. We conclude with a brief agenda for future research.

We present an overview of the academic literature on philanthropy, divided in two parts. In part one, we discuss the question of who gives how much; in part two, we discuss the question of why people give. In part one, we survey the literature on characteristics of individuals and households that are related to giving. In part two, we identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive giving: (1) awareness of need; (2) solicitation; (3) costs and benefits; (4) altruism; (5) reputation; (6) psychological benefits; (7) values; (8) efficacy. We evaluate the progress in the almost 500 studies we reviewed and suggest directions for future research on philanthropy.

The authors thank René Bekkers, Theo Schuyt and the anonymous reviewers of Social Forces for their comments and suggestions.