Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 336-350).

The fight against poverty in the United States has existed since the inception of the country. Each successive generation has had their own unique view on the causes of poverty and the use of institutions to suppress it. This dissertation focuses on institutions helping the poor during the Progressive Era from 1900 to 1930. During this time period poverty relief fundamentally evolved from private charities providing the bulk of relief efforts to government agencies becoming the more important source of aid.Research into poverty relief for this time period has been deficient mostly from a lack of quality data. To further the literature, I have created a unique data set that provides information about both governmental and private relief efforts throughout the era. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on quantitatively and qualitatively documenting the evolution of institutions from 1900 to 1930 in Massachusetts. Particular emphasis is on how the public's changing attitudes towards the poor altered the institutions used to provide relief. The second chapter studies the effects of government spending on private spending. I highlight how nonprofit managers' behavior would lead them to reduce spending when the government became the first avenue of support for the poor. The third chapter tests assumptions made in the second chapter about nonprofit managerial behavior. Unfortunately, data from 1900 to 1930 does not have the quality to answer these questions. Therefore, I use a similar data set from 1998 to 2003 to test how nonprofit managers adjust their spending, program service revenue, and savings to the business cycle.

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.

No description available.

Understanding the composition and distribution of the revenue of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) is key to understanding NPOs themselves. This research uses revenue data for 87,127 charitable NPOs to draw three main conclusions. First, revenue structures of NPOs vary widely by subsector and organizational size, with many NPOs demonstrating revenue structures that might be considered uncharacteristic of the nonprofit sector. Second, despite the concerns of many nonprofit scholars, heavy dependence on either government funding or charitable contributions is atypical of NPOs. And third, nonprofit revenue is highly concentrated in relatively few NPOs. The description of revenue expands to examine the relationship between two important sources of revenue, charitable contributions and government subsidies. Nonprofit scholars have long theorized that government funding diminishes charitable giving. This research finds that the effect of subsidy on charity varies substantially among the nonprofit subsectors, but, contrary to widely accepted theory, these effects are more often positive than negative: More than half of government funding of the nonprofit subsectors appears to spur an increase in charitable giving, whereas only 6 percent of government funding is associated with decreased giving. This research suggests that effects of subsidy on charity are less likely due to the decisions of donors than to the decisions of NPOs themselves. These findings assuage some concerns about the future of the nonprofit sector but substantiate others. As government increasingly relies on NPOs to deliver government-funded services, it appears unlikely that NPOs will suffer decreases in charitable giving, and government funding may even enable NPOs to increase revenue from charitable giving. But marginal changes in charitable giving will not mitigate what many see as a distressing move away from reliance on charity toward generating fees for services and generally becoming more business-like. Whether these findings represent a nonprofit sector betraying its charitable roots, diluting its power to effect social change by corporatizing, emphasizing service delivery at the expense of advocacy, or becoming more efficient, financially stable, and responsive to market demands remains a matter of debate, but debate better informed by the understanding of nonprofit revenue provided by this research.

No description available.

The impact of external debt on economic growth is a debatable issue between scholars since the onset of the debt crisis in 1980’s. This thesis examines whether external debt affects the economic growth of selected heavily indebted poor African countries through the debt overhang and debt crowding out effect. This is carried out by using data for eight heavily indebted poor African countries between 1991 to 2010.The result from estimation shows that external debt affects economic growth by the debt crowding out effect rather than debt overhang. Moreover, in an attempt to mark out debt servicing history, the thesis found the selected countries are not paying (servicing) more than 95% of their accumulated debt.

Master-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2007.

No description available.

Over the last century the Chesapeake Bay has been plagued by pollution, disease and overharvesting of its resources. As a result, the Bay has been the focus of substantial research and the beneficiary of numerous environmental programs. Previous work has suggested that people are willing to pay for improved water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. For policymakers, the key challenge is to determine how to allocate scarce funds across alternative regulatory and subsidy programs. This thesis investigates three new research questions that relate to the policymaker's problem. First, does WTP for a given water quality improvement depend on the process used to obtain that improvement? Second, does introducing a publicly funded program to improve water quality crowd out private donations to charitable organizations? Third, could oysters in the Chesapeake Bay be successfully marketed as a "green" good? The results from an attribute based choice experiment survey indicate that individuals value process and that they have a higher value for water quality improvement processes that include positive externalities such as increasing oyster populations and planting acres of tall grasses. The results also imply that the new water quality program will crowd out a small portion of private donations to charitable organizations. For example, a $1 tax increase for a new water quality program would crowd out approximately $0.02 of private donations to Chesapeake Bay organizations. Finally, results from a contingent valuation exercise suggest that oyster consumers are willing to pay a significant premium for ecolabeled oysters. Specifically, consumers are willing to pay a 58% premium for half-shell oysters. / Master of Science