Search Results

This chapter examines various data sources on charitable giving in the United States to establish six crucial facts about the giving of American Christians. These are that at least one out of five American Christians — twenty percent of all American Christians — gives literally nothing to church, para-church, or nonreligious charities; the vast majority of American Christians give very little to church, para-church, or nonreligious charities; American Christians do not give their dollars evenly among themselves, but, rather, a small minority of generous givers among them contributes most of the total Christian dollars given; higher income earning American Christians — like Americans generally — give little to no more money as a percentage of household income than lower income earning Christians; despite a massive growth of real per capita income over the 20th century, the average percentage share of income given by American Christians not only did not grow actually declined slightly during this time period; and the vast majority of the money that American Christians do give to religion is spent in and for their own local communities of faith — little is spent on missions, development, and poverty relief outside of local congregations, particularly outside the United States.

This chapter summarizes five facts from the recent literature on consumption behavior during retirement. Most importantly, it shows that there is substantial heterogeneity in spending changes at retirement across consumption categories. Observed declines in spending during retirement are limited to food and work-related expenses. Even though food spending declines during retirement, actual food intake remains constant. Furthermore, the literature shows that there is substantial heterogeneity across households in the change in expenditure associated with retirement. Much of this heterogeneity, however, can be explained by households involuntarily retiring. Overall, the evidence suggests that the standard model of lifecycle consumption augmented with home production and uncertain health shocks does well in explaining the consumption patterns of most households as they transition into retirement.

Disputing the contention that the Reformation led to a loss of interest in memorialising the dead, this chapter analyses the rich and varied commemorative culture of post-Reformation England. It explores the concept of ‘duties’ towards the dead, including the imperative not to speak ill of them. The changing meanings of the concept of ‘memory’ are addressed, and new, as well as continuing, patterns of memorialisation are traced through tomb construction, epitaphs, printed funeral sermons, and forms of charitable giving. The ways that the memory of the dead mediated social status and hierarchy among the living are explored, and the chapter argues against the notion that either ‘secularization’ or ‘individualism’ are the keynotes of post-Reformation society's conceptualization of its dead.

This chapter examines the motivations for charitable giving. It takes a look at the aspirations and expectations of individual donors from the United Kingdom to a certain Muslim charity, Islamic Relief. This discussion occasionally refers to Islamic teachings, which help in understanding the motivations of many donors, and to the structure of development programs and organizational fundraising. This chapter also challenges and confirms several basic assumptions about the motivations of donors.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of medieval hospitals. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hundreds of hospitals and leper houses were founded all over Europe to care for the poor, sick, and vulnerable, and these new charitable institutions received broad support from townspeople, merchants, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics. That these “houses of mercy” were often located in the heart of urban centers, at major points of circulation, and near areas of economic exploitation reflected the degree to which they were easily accessible, highly visible, and thoroughly enmeshed in the local society and economy. As an institution, the medieval hospital was not conceived primarily in medical terms but rather functioned in a variety of ways, including as a religious house, a hostel, a shelter, a retirement home, or a temporary place for physical rehabilitation and convalescence. This book's study of the emergence of hospitals in Champagne casts new light on the nature of religious charity during Europe's first great age of commerce. It demonstrates that far from eroding the power of the gift, the new commercial economy infused charitable giving and service with new social and religious meaning and a heightened expectation of reward.

Many people do not give as much as they can afford to charity due to the seeming irrelevance of a single contribution. The problem with good causes is that the very thing that makes a charity a good cause is the enormity of the problem it is fighting. Yet because the problem is so vast, it appears that one's gift is merely a drop in the bucket. This chapter proposes a strategy to deal with this problem. It involves expanding upon the idea and power of a matching grant: the Choose-Your-Charity Tax. Under the current tax system, contributions to eligible charities are tax-deductible. The Choose-Your-Charity Tax proposal would replace that rule—and go much further. The new rule would be this: People would get a tax credit of $1 for each dollar they spend, up to a certain limit, on a charitable contribution. To make the plan revenue-neutral for the government, that limit would be equivalent to a tax increase.

This chapter provides an overview of the conference volume and presents unique evidence on the historical and comparative evolution of charitable giving and tax policies. It summarizes the main aspects of the comparative history of tax incentives, focusing on countries for which original historical panels of tax data have been collected: US, Canada, France and Denmark. It then discuss the advantages of using tax data to analyze charitable giving and presents some original results on the comparison of the long run evolution of charitable contributions across these countries. Finally, it presents the main policy questions addressed in the volume, from the positive analysis of the behavioural responses to charitable incentives to the normative analysis of the optimal tax treatment of gifts.

Charitable contributions play a bigger role in the provision of public goods in the United States than in other developed countries. This chapter begins by providing some broader context for understanding the role of tax policy toward charitable giving in the US. It describes the basic components of American tax policy, its implications for incentives for donors, and some of the prominent tax policy issues that arise in connection with the charitable deduction. It also discusses the unusually large role played by wealthy donors by virtue of the charitable deduction. Then, the chapter discusses issues of optimal design of tax policy on charitable giving and examines the possible effect of different tax reforms.

This chapter reports findings from an interdisciplinary investigation of charitable giving. The authors studied charity contributions using a Dictator Game experimental design whereby participants are given tokens with real money value and can decide to contribute to charity or to keep the money for themselves. But to get a better sense of the role of morals and emotions, they also asked participants to explain their motivations for giving. In addition, they conducted the experiment with the same student participants at two different points in time. They found that those who contribute more to charity tend to be women, tend to evaluate themselves as less self-interested, and are more likely to have been those who gave to charity at the first point in time. The choices of particular charities are not very consistent over time but depend on participants' moral and emotional evaluations. The chapter concludes that even in abstract experimental conditions, moral judgments and emotional underpinnings are not discrete influences on how people think about and use money but are thoroughly intertwined, relationally grounded, and reinforced by practice.

This chapter provides unique evidence of substantial behavioral responses of wealthy taxpayers to charitable giving deductions in a very long time perspective, using original historical data collected from tax records. It then investigates the anatomy of this response. Using the tightening of the rules regulating private foundations implemented in 1969 as a natural experiment on tax enforcement in the US, it shows that tax cheating and tax optimization explain a large fraction of the elasticity of charitable giving of the very wealthy. The chapter develops a model of tax cheating and shows that tax cheating is a first-order phenomenon to assess optimal tax policies for charitable contributions.

This chapter discusses the life and experiences of Dorothea of Mansfeld. She was considered to be one of the best healing practitioner in German court culture. This chapter presents the link between medical practice, charitable giving, and court patronage. It highlights how Dorothea benefited from the pious reputation and fame for her healing acts. It also tackles how she used her reputation to her own advantage by writing about her healing.

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on charitable giving in economics and on the debates surrounding optimal policies toward charitable giving, illustrated by the case study of giving for overseas development in the UK. It first reconsiders the motives for charitable giving within the framework of utility maximisation and proposes a new formulation, the “‘identification” approach, that blends the scale of the warm-glow approach with the results focus of the public goods formulation. It then analyzes giving as part of a dynamic lifetime process, considering both lifetime giving and charitable bequests.It finally turns to the normative questions and the challenges for welfare economics.These are two-fold. First, the existence of individual concern for charitable objects raises the issue as to how such individual concerns should enter the social welfare function Secondly, the case study considered here raises the issue of the global reach of the social welfare function

The same dual–motive theory that combines altruism and egoism/warm glow is used in economics to study charitable giving and in psychology to study helping behavior. However, the two disciplines have taken different approaches to experimental testing. This paper builds a bridge between the different experimental approaches. For economists, the importance of this bridge is that it leads to a systematic description of six specific types of egoism/warm glow, and further suggests experimental designs that could be used to investigate warm glow motives in charitable giving. For psychologists, the bridge is important because the experimental design in economics suggests a way to test, directly rather than indirectly, the empathy–altruism hypothesis.

This chapter discusses philanthropy in the Kingdom of Jordan. Although Jordan is not a wealthy country by world standards, the philanthropic sector in the country is thriving and the private sector is fully engaged. Private philanthropic giving in Jordan has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry, one that is undergoing a vigorous transformation. The institutionalization of philanthropy in Jordan is rapidly increasing, with many philanthropists thinking in terms of long-term social change as opposed to charitable giving.

This chapter discusses philanthropy in Qatar. Qatar's charitable activities include both traditional and creative modes of channeling philanthropy. Since these philanthropic initiatives are relatively recent, perhaps the main recommendation that could be made is that they focus on continued growth and diversification. Like-minded initiatives should establish productive avenues of communication among themselves to ensure the effectiveness of their giving and to avoid duplication. The momentum corporate philanthropy has gained over the past few years needs to be maintained, with greater emphasis placed on institutionalization. Currently, most corporate social responsibility initiatives take the form of financial donations or in-kind contributions to worthy causes, but companies are expected increasingly to seek to align their core business activities with goals and programs that engage the entire work force and supply chain in addressing sustainable development and attacking poverty at its roots.

Charitable donations are an important revenue source for many institutions of higher education. We explore how donations respond to economic and financial market shocks, accounting for both supply and demand channels through which these shocks operate. In panel data with fixed effects to control for unobservable differences across universities, we find that overall donations to higher education-and especially capital donations for university endowments or for buildings-are positively and significantly correlated with the average income and house values in the state where the university is located (supply effects). We also find that when a university suffers a negative endowment shock that is large relative to its operating budget, donations increase (demand effects). This is especially true for donations earmarked for current use. We conclude by discussing the importance of understanding how donations respond to economic shocks for effective financial risk management by colleges and universities.