Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The study of the nonprofit sector has traditionally focused on nonprofit organizations as recipients of charity. A perspective that has been relatively neglected is that of nonprofit organizations as not only recipients but also as donors of charitable resources. This dissertation explores the phenomenon of philanthropic behavior of nonprofit organizations, using studies of the contributions and community health programs of nonprofit hospitals in Indiana as an example. Philanthropic behavior is defined as actions and programs initiated by a nonprofit organization to meet additional community needs – beyond its primary mission or services. It presents the hypothesis that such activities are undertaken for reasons similar to for-profit organizations – and have comparable organizational benefits. The studies reported in the dissertation show a wide variation in reporting such activities as well as of the organizational structures in place to manage such behavior. This variation is seen even in seemingly similar hospitals such as religious hospitals within an identified system. The dissertation discovers that while nonprofit organizations may engage in philanthropic behavior, these practices go largely unrecognized. Because the actions are not systematically noted or recorded, some very significant residual benefits that nonprofits provide for their defined communities are also unrecognized. It also finds that when these activities are evident, they are driven more by the professional values and actions of individual employees than by organizational policies. The dissertation concludes that drawing conclusions from this study of the data on Indiana hospitals – both from state reports and the IRS Form 990s – is difficult. There is an inconsistency between the two databases as well as within each of the datasets that makes any specific conclusions as to the relative values of different hospitals or to standards is suspect. It notes that while the revised Form 990 should help in overall transparency, the reporting of areas such as health education and donations will most probably continue to be inconsistent. This inconsistency makes the information difficult to use as either an evaluation tool or as policy to encourage community-serving behavior.

This thesis is historical in nature. It adopts a methodology that has recently taken the study of accounting history into the arena of the social; leaving behind tradi- tional notions of accounting as being only what accountants do. The focus of the study is on the annual reporting of activity, in terms of both its nancial and phys- ical dimensions, in the history of the British voluntary hospital movement. The study is highly contextualised. By adopting this approach it has been possible to show how accounting reports initially enabled the managers of medical institutions to reverse the focus of accountability onto those charitable individuals that were providing the funding for the hospitals. This greatly strengthened the fundrais- ing capacity of the hospital, while simultaneously de ecting attention away from the e cacy of the institution itself. Later, however, it is shown that after various abortive or only partially successful attempts, it was possible, through the medium of a uniform accounting system, to return the focus of accountability back onto the management of the hospitals. It is important to note that the success of this movement was contingent less on the quality or viability of the accounting system than the legitimacy of the organisation that published its results. Until this legit- imacy was established in the minds of the users of the accounts the e ects of the accounting was severely limited. Once it was rmly established the accounts be- came a powerful knowledge technology that enabled a substantial degree of control to be exercised over hospitals, such that a `quasi-system' of hospitals was created.

This paper explores cross-country variations in charitable giving and investigates the association of welfare state policies with private philanthropy. Hypotheses are drawn from crowding-out theory and considerations about the influence of a country's mixed economy of welfare. We add to the on-going discussion concerning the crowding-out hypothesis with empirical evidence by looking at specific charitable subsectors people donate to across countries. Using Eurobarometer survey data that include 23 countries, we find no evidence for a crowding-out effect, but rather a crosswise crowding-in effect of private donations. Moreover, giving behaviour differs between non-profit regimes.

Devotional and charitable confraternities were a characteristic feature of late medieval Florence. The popularity of the former, and particularly the laudesi and flagellants, stemmed from the fact that they enabled the layman to participate in areas of worship which had been previously the exclusive dcanain of the clergy. The laudesi specialised in singing lauds which during the fifteenth century came to be perfomed by professional singers and musicians. This helped the companies to maintain their devotion, but at the same tine removed the necessity for members to attend daily services. Moreover the'laudesi societies' acceptance of bequests meant that some became as concerned to provide services for the dead as for the living. In contrast flagellant canpanies retained their vitality by emphasizing a strict penitential devotion and refusing to become involved in the administration of property. ) The most important charitable cccpany was Or S. Michele, which was founded in the late thirteenth century to supervise the cult of the miraculous Madonna and to distribute the public's oblations to the poor. During the Black Death the conpany inherited a large fortune which changed the character of many of its activities. Successive governments sought to protect Or S. Michele from litigious heirs and corrupt carpany officials and then proceeded to borrow money to help cover its own debts and finance catrnunal construction projects including the oratory of Or S. Michele. After the Black Death alms were no longer distributed to a large number of paupers, but to a more exclusive clientele. By the end of the Trecento Or S. Michele had a tarnished reputation and the cult had lost much of its vitality except as a centre for public festivals. This decline was shared by the Misericordia, and Florence was thereby deprived of the services of any large private charities until the foundation of the Buonanini di S. Martino in the mid-fifteenth century.

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Although the link between violent video games and aggressive behavior has received extensive coverage, there is growing evidence that prosocial video games can exert a positive influence as well. However, whether these effects generalize to costlier prosocial behaviors that help more distant recipients remains unclear. Here I propose an experimental study to examine whether prosocial video games can influence charitable donation behavior. College students will be randomly assigned to play 45 min of either a prosocial video game (Lemmings) or neutral video game (Tetris), followed by a 10 min filler task (mental calculation). Participants will then be asked to complete a payment form, indicating if they want to donate a portion of their experimental participation payment to a local nonprofit organization. Based on previous research, we predict that there will be a main effect of gender, with female participants more likely to donate than males. Additionally, we hypothesize a main effect of video game, where participants who play the prosocial video game will be likelier to donate than those who play the neutral game. If confirmed, these results would extend the existing literature on prosocial video games beyond informal face-to-face helping behaviors, potentially providing a psychological mechanism for costlier needs such as charitable appeals.

The nonprofit sector is becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy both as an employer and service provider. Although most of the sector’s revenues are earned, the ability of the nonprofit sector to generate significant levels of unearned income in the form of grants and contributions reinforces the sector’s uniqueness. This dissertation uses the NCCS-Guidestar data to address questions pertaining to the determinants of nonprofits’ contributions and government grants. Each of the essays’ findings is discussed briefly below. The first chapter examines the relationship between an organization’s finances and the level of government grants received. Because organizations choose to apply for government grants, a Heckman procedure is coupled with fixed effects to produce unbiased, within organization estimates. When controlling for the probability an organization receives grant funding, the average level of grants an organization receives generally increases with improvements in efficiency measures. In testing Brooks’ (2004) adjusted performance measure, the author finds that for many categories of nonprofit organizations, improvements in performance relative to community expectations increase grants for recipients, but better performance reduces the probability an organization receives any government grants. The second essay examines the determinants of direct support to organizations in four of the major categories, namely Arts, Education, Health, and Human Services, using instrumental and panel techniques. Unlike government grants, changes in price do not affect organizations’ expected contributions. When significant, government grants generally crowd out private donations while the effects of program service revenue vary by category and specification. The final essay examines the effects of nonprofit expenses and revenues on direct support for organizations in four small subcategories, Disaster Preparedness, International Aid, Environmental Conservation, and Performing Arts. The essay tests whether the impact of various revenue and expense variables on direct support changes around an unexpected event such as 9/11. Results suggest that the events of 9/11 had a greater moderating effect for categories losing funding compared to categories that received a windfall of contributions.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1996. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2961. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 93).

This thesis explores some theoretical and empirical issues in the voluntary contributions to public good. Chapter I contains a brief motivation and introduction. In chapters II and III, we analyze two non-cooperative methods for either enhancing or mitigating externality-causing activities. Chapter II deals with positive externality in the public good contribution context, and chapter III with negative externality in the pollution abatement context. Chapter IV contains an empirical analysis of charitable donations by the elderly. Chapter II models the so-called ``corporate challenge gift'' used in real world fund-raising, and adopts the concept to voluntary contributions to public goods more generally. We model the process as a sequential game in public good contributions. One of the agents sets a quantity-contingent matching scheme to leverage higher contributions from the other players. Under the assumption that the preferences of agents are public information and the assumption that the scheme setter can commit to the matching plan, we show that the scheme brings efficient levels of total contributions to the public good. Chapter III applies some ideas from a joint work with Professor Robin Boadway and Professor Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Tremblay on ``Commitment and Matching Contributions to Public Goods'' to the issue of reducing negative externality-causing activity. In particular, it adapts both the Guttman-Danziger-Schnytzer type of rate-matching mechanism and the quantity-contingent matching method for public good contributions to the international pollution abatement problem. In a simple two-country model, we find that both matching schemes induce the countries to internalize the negative externality imposed on the other country. However, perhaps due to the lack of enough policy instruments, they cannot equate the marginal costs of abatement across the countries, leaving room for Pareto improvement. This further improvement can be achieved if the two countries also contribute to a conventional public~good. Chapter IV is an empirical exercise on some positive externality-generating activities by the elderly. It attempts to document the charitable giving of money and time by people aged 60 or above in the 2003 PSID data for the United States and analyze the influences of some economic and demographic factors on these activities. Income, wealth, the subjective rating of health status, and years in school are found to have statistically significant impacts. Income and wealth appear to have distinct influences. The tax price of money donation also has a statistically significant effect on money donations. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2007-11-19 01:48:10.777

Abstract In the Assessed Taxes Act 1798, and the Duties upon Income Act 1799, William Pitt the Younger provided exemptions from those taxes for charitable institutions. However, the legislation failed to provide a definition of charitable purposes with respect to either Assessed Taxes or Duties upon Income. The problems for charitable institutions began when Addington introduced deduction at source in 1803, thus catching charitable institutions in the tax net by requiring them to claim refunds of Income Tax that had been deducted from their non-voluntary income. To deal with the issues arising from such claims, Pitt created the Special Commissioners in 1805. The Duties upon Income Act 1799 and its successors were only intended as temporary war-time taxes, and Income Tax was eventually repealed in 1816 once peace with France had been achieved. However, Peel reintroduced Income Tax in 1842, based on the earlier Income Tax Acts. Once again, Income Tax was intended only as a short-term fiscal measure, but that was not to be and, during the course of the Nineteenth Century, the Income Tax became a permanent fixture of the legislative calendar. However, the issue of what was understood by the term “charitable purposes” with respect to Income Tax became an issue which, it was suggested in 1863, Parliament should resolve. That was not to be, and it was not until 1891 that Lord Macnaghten, in Commissioners for the Special Purposes of the Income Tax v Pemsel [1891] AC 531 laid down the four principal divisions of charity that continue to dominate charity case law in the Twenty-First Century. Until then, the exemption of charitable institutions from Income Tax had been a contentious issue. Anthony Highmore, a London lawyer who was also very active in a number of London’s charities in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries until his death in 1829, proposed in 1786, that charities should be exempt from all forms of taxation. In 1863 Gladstone unsuccessfully challenged the exemption of charitable institutions from Income Tax, arguing that income other than voluntary donations should be taxed, and that governments should decide which charitable institutions were worthy of direct government funding. However, charity case law continued to influence the decisions of the Special Commissioners until ultimately in 1891 Pemsel resolved the issue in a case which continues to resonate in the Twenty-first Century. The question that this Thesis seeks to answer is, what was the rationale for the charitable purposes exemption from Income Tax that Pitt had provided in his Income Tax Acts? I propose that the rationale was not founded in fiscal policy, or charity case law, but in social policy as influenced by the Evangelicals of late Eighteenth Century London, predominantly William Wilberforce and Hannah More, who were close friends of William Pitt the Younger.