For many years, the determination of which organizations should qualify for the significant tax benefits accorded to "registered charities" ( "organismes de bienfaisance enregistres") under the Canadian Income Tax Act has been based, in all provinces, on the concept of charity developed by the English common law of charitable trusts. However, there are other sources of meaning for the concept of "charity" ( "bienfaisance") in Canada, including ancient, civil law sources that continue to form part of the basic law of Quebec. / This study challenges the longstanding, unijural approach to the registered charity provisions on the basis of the constitutional division of powers, and the federal government's commitment to respecting bijuralism and bilingualism in its legislative texts. It explores the diverse, legal sources concerning charity and the devotion of property to the public good that form part of the law of property and civil rights in the provinces. Finally, it examines how these diverse provincial sources might affect the current approach to the registered charity provisions, and the project of ensuring that federal laws are accessible to each of Canada's Francophone civil law, Francophone common law, Anglophone civil law and Anglophone common law audiences.

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Unrelated business enterprises have been an appropriate way for nonprofit organizations to generate income since the first income tax was enacted into law. The Internal Revenue Act of 1950 clarified this opportunity and enacted the Unrelated Business Income Tax to ensure that fair competition existed between nonprofits and for profit organizations. Nonprofit organizations conducting unrelated business enterprises are faced with a dilemma: it is legal for them to conduct such enterprises but if they do so they face potential litigation from for profit business for unfair competition and/or potential loss of tax-exempt status for operating outside of their exempt function. This dissertation traces the history and theory of tax-exempt status, the history of unrelated business enterprises, and how several states, including Oregon, have addressed the issue. It then explains two major pieces of litigation in Oregon in the 1980's, Southern Oregon State College and YMCA of Columbia-Willamette, then discusses the history of the media attention and legislative/bureaucratic action in the same period. Current litigation and media attention is then discussed. The paper then discusses two theoretical frameworks, Agenda Building and Advocacy Coalition, as a means to analyze the data. Following is a discussion of how the issues of unrelated business enterprises and unfair business competition can be handled by nonprofits and the changing criteria for tax-exempt status in Oregon. The dissertation concludes with the changing criteria for tax-exempt status in Oregon and fundamental philosophical and political issues yet to be decided. Included are recommendations such as a periodic review of tax-exempt status of nonprofits, the need for nonprofits to continually review their mission and exempt purpose, the need for nonprofits to maintain their relationships with the community they serve, and how nonprofits need to develop a self-governing program before government develops one for them.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This dissertation consists of two essays on nonprofit finance. Nonprofit finance concerns obtaining and managing financial resources to support the social purposes of nonprofit organizations. A unique feature of nonprofit finance is that nonprofits derive revenue from a variety of sources. Nonprofit finance thus involves answering two fundamental questions: What is the optimal combination of revenue sources that supports a nonprofit to achieve its mission? Where and how to obtain the revenue sources? The two dissertation essays address these two questions respectively. The first essay, titled “Modern Portfolio Theory and the Optimization of Nonprofit Revenue Mix,” is among the first to properly apply modern portfolio theory (MPT) from corporate finance to nonprofit finance. By analyzing nonprofit tax return data, I estimate the expected return and risk characteristics for five nonprofit revenue sources as well as the correlations among these returns. I use the estimates to identify the efficient frontiers for nonprofits in different industries, based on which nonprofit managers can select an optimal portfolio that can minimize the risk given a preferred level of service provision or maximize the return given a level of risk. The findings also pose a challenge to the predominant approach used in previous nonprofit finance studies (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) and suggest that MPT is theoretically and practically more helpful in guiding nonprofit revenue management. The second essay, titled “Charitable Giving in Nonprofit Service Associations: Identities, Incentives, and Gender Differences,” concerns nonprofit resource attainment, specifically, how do decisionmaking contexts and framing affect donations. Membership in a service club is characterized by two essential elements: members’ shared interest in the club’s charitable mission; and private benefits that often come as a result of social interactions with other members, such as networking, fellowship, and fun. A laboratory experiment was designed to examine 1) whether membership in a service club makes a person more generous and 2) the effect of service club membership—stressing either the service or socializing aspects—on individual support for collective goods. The study finds that female individuals are the least generous when they are reminded of the socializing aspect of service-club membership.