Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-65).

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This study is concerned with the government of private social welfare agencies, and in particular, with the measure of agreement that the conduct of their government shows with the principles of political representation. Diverse and, as yet, imperfectly reconciled theories exist as to the nature of representativeness in government, but for the purposes of this investigation the concept has been specified in terms of a number of selected propositions that would probably be taken as axiomatic in the political traditions of western countries. These include the notions that all enfranchised members of a political society should enjoy the effective right to participation in the choice of their government; that the representative himself is charged to act with a view to the good of the whole group and not with partiality towards some particular and subordinate interest within it; and that the membership has a right to require an accounting from the representative for the manner of his performance in office. The examination of these questions has been annexed in the present study to the special case of the representation on the boards of directors of the private welfare agencies of the segment of the organized, labour movement falling into the relevant jurisdiction. Among the methods used in making the investigation were: (1) a review of the criteria of membership recognized by the private agencies both in their formal constitutions and in their procedural traditions; (2) an assessment of the conduct of the agencies' general meetings when viewed as a mechanism of accountability; 3) an analysis of the composition of the agency boards by certain occupational categories; and (4) a number of interviews with selected union officials, themselves differentiated, on the basis of whether they were members of agency boards or not. The findings of the study are that there is a pervasive ambiguity about the status of the agencies in relation to the formal categories of "private" and "public", that the agencies are unable to render a consistent or plausible account of the theory of political organization to which they hold themselves bound, and that their internal political processes fail to satisfy even those criteria, of legitimacy that they themselves volunteer. The question of the representation of labour groups was held in abeyance for want of agreement in any quarter as to what would constitute evidence for an answer to it. / Arts, Faculty of / Social Work, School of / Graduate

This study was designed for the purpose of learning from the families, who are receiving assistance, what dependency means to them. The sample was selected from the Mothers' Allowance and Social Assistance categories. A group of twelve families comprised the sample that was used for intensive study. The families were interviewed personally by the writer to study their status prior to the onset of dependency, and specifically their experiences and status during their dependency years, with emphasis on the meaning of case work services to the families. The families' experiences and status point up the fact, that the maximum standard of living to be achieved within the policies of the agency is unusually low: the assistance payments are too small for a family to be able to maintain or achieve a standard of living providing for a "reasonably normal and healthy existence"; policy concerning treatment of other income and resources, appears to be sufficiently restrictive to prevent the families from making successful use of them to improve their standard of living; and finally, the professional case worker's role to help the families develop their own strengths, and make full use of other (community) resources is invalidated to a large degree, through the agency's rules and regulations concerning treatment of such income and resources. The case worker's role as a helping person to the families appeared to be especially significant during the early stages of the families' dependency status. The follow-up service, or sustaining case work treatment, is largely concerned with, verification of continued eligibility for financial assistance, only in terms represented by the maximum provided for in the social allowance scale. The implications of the study are, that the agency's policies, in terms of the families experiences, might warrant some revision to the extent that the professional case worker can function in his intended role as a helping person to the family. / Arts, Faculty of / Social Work, School of / Graduate

This thesis explores three topics in the study of charities and charitable giving. The first chapter studies a classic question in public economics which deals with how charities react to government grants. In recent years this question of understanding crowd-out from the charity's perspective has been extended by numerous authors. This chapter is an extension of this work by using the framework from Andreoni, Payne, and Smith (2014) which studied the impact of a specific granting program in the UK. We use a grant program for charities from a Canadian provincial government agency to explore the extent to which these grants crowd out revenue from other sources. We are able to explore more than 15,000 applications by charities for funding over a 10-year period and have constructed a rich data set that captures information about the application and the revenues and expenses of the charity. We demonstrate that the overall revenues of the charity increases approximately 20% and that the effect of the grant extends several years. We also find that the grant raises revenue nearly dollar-for-dollar for small charities and by more than dollar-for-dollar for medium and large charities. The second chapter further explores how charities operate by studying how managers of charities influence the charity's finances. Using a novel dataset of Canadian charities that links the manager of a charity to the charity's financial data I employ a multi-leveled fixed effects model to estimate the effect the manager of a charity has on the charity's financial outcomes. I find that a one standard deviation increase in manager quality leads to a 0.516 standard deviation increase in total revenue, which amounts to over $500,000, with similar magnitudes for other measures of revenue and expenditures. I then use characteristics of the manager such as gender and marital status to find which characteristics are more prevalent in managers with higher estimated ability. Finally, I present evidence of positive match effects between managers and charities suggesting that good managers are assigned to good charities, and that the effect of a manager can persist even after the manager leaves the charity. Finally in the third chapter we explore the extent to which donation decisions are influenced by government policies. Specifically we study the extent to which the salience of a tax-induced incentive for charitable giving influences donors behaviour. Previous academic work has focused on estimating the price elasticity of giving and differences between permanent and transitory effects of changes in the price. This paper focuses on the timing and salience of tax incentives for giving. The Quebec provincial government responded to the January 12, 2010 Haiti Earthquake by permitting donations for the relief effort to be reported on the 2009 tax return. Residents in the rest of Canada reported their donations for Haiti relief efforts on their 2010 tax return. This difference in policy as well as the widespread announcement of the Quebec policy provides a natural experiment for testing whether the timing associated with reporting donations on one's tax return and the salience of the announcement of the policy affects charitable giving. In Canada, all tax filers with a tax liability can benefit from the reporting of donations and the credit available for such donations is tied to the level of the reported donations. We find that Quebec taxpayers gave more than taxpayers in the rest of Canada during this period and that this effect is driven by both an extensive (increased givers) and intensive (increased giving) margin. This result has important policy implications and contributes to current debates on the use of tax incentives to encourage charitable giving. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

Thesis (M.Comm.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1969. / Selected bibliography: l. 99-100.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985.