AN EMPIRICAL-TEST OF NEUTRALITY AND THE CROWDING-OUT HYPOTHESIS

This paper tests Warr's neutrality hypothesis that the voluntary provi sion of a public good is independent of the distribution of income. Sp ecifically, I test the null hypothesis of neutrality against the alter native that total contributions to a public good will be larger the le ss equally income is distributed. To test this hypothesis, a new data set is constructed by merging data on total voluntary contributions to individual public radio stations with 1990 Census data on the income distribution in each station's listening area. I find that voluntary c ontributions increase as income inequality rises.