The authors present an overview of the academic literature on charitable giving based on a literature review of more than 500 articles. They structure their review around the central question of why people donate money to charitable organizations. They identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive charitable giving: (a) awareness of need; (b) solicitation; (c) costs and benefits; (d) altruism; (e) reputation; (f) psychological benefits; (g) values; (h) efficacy. These mechanisms can provide a basic theoretical framework for future research explaining charitable giving.

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A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms That Drive Charitable Giving

In his seminal work \"The Clash of Civilizations\" and the \"Remaking of World Order,\" Samuel Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold war, \"civilizations\" were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in international politics.His astute analysis has proven correct. Now Professor Huntington turns his attention from international affairs to our domestic cultural rifts as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the \"denationalization\" of American elites.September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity. But already there are signs that this revival is fading, even though in the post-September 11 world, Americans face unprecedented challenges to our security.\"Who Are We?\" shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Nothing less than our national identity is at stake.Once again Samuel Huntington has written an important book that is certain to provoke a lively debate and to shape our national conversation about who we are.\\

Diasporas, Foreign Governments, and American Politics: An Excerpt from "Merging America with the World," in Who Are We? the Challenges to America's National Identity

What makes for a good theory in economics? Tastes and opinions differ on this important issue, with some admiring the mathematical elegance and logical completeness of analysis, some admiring the metaphoric insight provided by deep description, and others admiring the development of new analytic tools rather than the application of those tools to nonprofit issues. In this Chapter, I choose to evaluate economic theories of the nonprofit sector by their ability to answer what I regard as the central questions in (a) describing the sector; (b) formulating governmental policy towards the sector; and (c) managing nonprofit organizations. More specifically, I discuss theories’ ability to enlighten our understanding of the scope of inquiry, the determinants of the size and scope of the nonprofit sector, and the behavioral responses of donors, volunteers, paid staff, and nonprofit organizations to changes in their external environment. I then turn, more briefly and selectively, to theories’ ability to inform tax policy towards donations, taxation of nonprofit entities, competition among and between organizations in the various sectors, and fundraising regulation. Finally, I briefly discuss theories’ ability to improve the pricing, fundraising, and evaluation functions of nonprofit management.

Economic Theories of Nonprofit Organizations

Background Many studies report a positive association between smoking and mental illness. However, the literature remains mixed regarding the direction of this association. We therefore conducted a systematic review evaluating the association of smoking and depression and/or anxiety in longitudinal studies. Methods Studies were identified by searching PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science and were included if they: (1) used human participants, (2) were longitudinal, (3) reported primary data, (4) had smoking as an exposure and depression and/or anxiety as an outcome, or (5) had depression and/or anxiety as the exposure and smoking as an outcome. Results Outcomes from 148 studies were categorized into: smoking onset, smoking status, smoking heaviness, tobacco dependence, and smoking trajectory. The results for each category varied substantially, with evidence for positive associations in both directions (smoking to later mental health and mental health to later smoking) as well as null findings. Overall, nearly half the studies reported that baseline depression/anxiety was associated with some type of later smoking behavior, while over a third found evidence that a smoking exposure was associated with later depression/anxiety. However, there were few studies directly supporting a bidirectional model of smoking and anxiety, and very few studies reporting null results. Conclusions The literature on the prospective association between smoking and depression and anxiety is inconsistent in terms of the direction of association most strongly supported. This suggests the need for future studies that employ different methodologies, such as Mendelian randomization (MR), which will allow us to draw stronger causal inferences. Implications We systematically reviewed longitudinal studies on the association of different aspects of smoking behavior with depression and anxiety. The results varied considerably, with evidence for smoking both associated with subsequent depression and anxiety, and vice versa. Few studies supported a bidirectional relationship, or reported null results, and no clear patterns by gender, ethnicity, clinical status, length to follow-up, or diagnostic test. Suggesting that despite advantages of longitudinal studies, they cannot alone provide strong evidence of causality. Therefore, future studies investigating this association should employ different methods allowing for stronger causal inferences to be made, such as MR.

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The Association of Cigarette Smoking with Depression and Anxiety: A Systematic Review

Entrepreneurs are turning to crowdfunding as a way to finance their creative ideas. Crowdfunding involves relatively small contributions of many consumer-investors over a fixed time limit (generally a few weeks). In online crowdfunding communities, potential donors can see the level of support from other project backers as well as its timing before making their own funding decisions, suggesting that social information (i.e., others’ funding decisions) will play an important role in the ultimate success of a project. Two years of publicly available panel data on successfully and unsuccessfully funded projects listed on Kickstarter is used to empirically study the role of social information in the dynamic behavior of project backers. Building off the well-established social psychology theory around diffusion of responsibility effects, we show that additional backer support is negatively related to its past backer support. Many potential backers do not contribute to a project that has already received a lot of support because they assume that others will provide the necessary funding. Consistent with the deadline effect widely observed in bargaining and online auctions, we also show that the diffusion of responsibility effects diminish as the project funding cycle approaches its closing date. Moreover, as the project deadline draws near we find that project updates tend to increase as the project creators make a final plea for help to reach their funding goal. Reduced diffusion of responsibility effects, together with the positive influence of project updates, lead to generally increasing project support in the final stages of funding. This is particularly the case for projects that successfully achieve their goals as they are more likely to have an update in the last weeks of funding and generate more excitement from recent backers than projects that fall short.

Crowdfunding creative ideas: the dynamics of project backers in kickstarter

A theory of impact philanthropy

Modeling charitable contributions of time and money

Using Census and CPS data, we show that U.S.-born Mexican Americans who marry non-
Mexicans are substantially more educated and English proficient, on average, than are
Mexican Americans who marry co-ethnics (whether they be Mexican Americans or Mexican
immigrants). In addition, the non-Mexican spouses of intermarried Mexican Americans
possess relatively high levels of schooling and English proficiency, compared to the spouses
of endogamously married Mexican Americans. The human capital selectivity of Mexican
intermarriage generates corresponding differences in the employment and earnings of
Mexican Americans and their spouses. Moreover, the children of intermarried Mexican
Americans are much less likely to be identified as Mexican than are the children of
endogamous Mexican marriages. These forces combine to produce strong negative
correlations between the education, English proficiency, employment, and earnings of
Mexican-American parents and the chances that their children retain a Mexican ethnicity.
Such findings raise the possibility that selective ethnic “attrition” might bias observed
measures of intergenerational progress for Mexican Americans.

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Ethnic Identification, Intermarriage, and Unmeasured Progress by Mexican Americans

Using microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census and from recent years of the Current Population Survey (CPS), we investigate whether selective intermarriage and endogenous ethnic identification interact to hide some of the intergenerational progress achieved by the Mexican-origin population in the United States. First, using Census data for U.S.-born youth ages 16-17 who have at least one Mexican parent, we estimate how the Mexican identification, high school dropout rates, and English proficiency of these youth depend on whether they are the product of endogamous or exogamous marriages. Second, we analyze the extent and selectivity of ethnic attrition among second-generation Mexican-American adults and among U.S.-born Mexican-American youth. Using CPS data, we directly assess the influence of endogenous ethnicity by comparing an "objective" indicator of Mexican descent (based on the countries of birth of the respondent and his parents and grandparents) with the standard "subjective" measure of Mexican self-identification (based on the respondent's answer to the Hispanic origin question). For third-generation Mexican-American youth, we show that ethnic attrition is substantial and could produce significant downward bias in standard measures of attainment which rely on ethnic self-identification rather than objective indicators of Mexican ancestry.

Intermarriage and the Intergenerational Transmission of Ethnic Identity and Human Capital for Mexican Americans

Hispanics in the U.S. Labor Market Brian Duncan V. Joseph Hotz Stephen J. Trejo CCPR-040-05 February 2005 California Center for Population Research On-Line Working Paper Series

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Brian Duncan

Papers

A theory of impact philanthropy

Modeling charitable contributions of time and money

Ethnic Identification, Intermarriage, and Unmeasured Progress by Mexican Americans

Intermarriage and the Intergenerational Transmission of Ethnic Identity and Human Capital for Mexican Americans

Hispanics in the U.S. Labor Market