Income Gaps Cause Decline in Volunteering, Study Finds

Americans are less likely to volunteer today than in years past, in part because the disparity in incomes has grown and because so many women now hold full-time jobs, according to a new study.

Economists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts University have estimated that people ages 25 to 54 were 5 percent less likely to be volunteers in 1989 than were people in that age group in 1974.

The study examined a wide range of the ties that bind a society together -- or

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