Arthur C. Brooks

Why do People Give? New Evidence and Strategies for Nonprofit Managers

As the nonprofit sector grows and its relationship with the public sector deepens, nonprofit managers are working harder at developing donated financial and human resources. Although much research on nonprofit fund-raising has looked at who donates and which fund-raising strategies are most effective, no work to date has connected the two concepts; to illuminate which fund-raising strategies work with which donors. Using interview data conducted with nonprofit fund-raising executives and survey data on Atlanta residents, the authors estimate the impacts of sociodemographic and economic characteristics on the success of different donor development approaches. After constructing conceptual and empirical models, the authors’ data analysis allows them to develop a set of management implications that will assist nonprofit managers in crafting development strategies for the organizations they operate.

Can Nonprofit Management Help Answer Public Management’s “Big Questions”?

Are the fields of nonprofit management and public management naturally complementary, or are they substitutes? Briefly surveying the nonprofit literature on board governance, volunteer management, and performance measurement, the author shows that study of the third sector can help inform public management’s “big questions”. As such, nonprofit studies and scholarship should represent an improvement to public administration curricula and a fertile source of ideas for public managers.

Do Government Subsidies To Nonprofits Crowd Out Donations or Donors

The traditional test of the public-goods crowding-out effect may mask important impacts of government subsidies on private giving because it confounds the effects of subsidies on average donation size versus their effects on the number of donors. Using panel data on the U.S. nonprofit sector, the author shows that, although increased public funding has a neutral effect on total donations, it is associated with decreased average donations but a larger pool of donors.

The Effects of Public Policy on Private Charity

What do we know empirically about the governments impact on private charitable giving? This article surveys several disparate literatures and data sources on the reaction of private citizens to their most frequent interactions with the public sector. These studies suggest that charitable giving is negatively affected by most tax reforms, receipt ofwelfare payments, government funding of nonprofit activities, and rising confidence in government. These and other findings have implications for policy.

What is the Real Relationship between Income and Charitable Giving

Many studies have focused on the relationship between income and charitable donations either by comparing income and percentage of income donated to construct a “giving curve” or by calculating the income elasticity of giving. In this article, the authors relate these two types of studies to one another, using 1997 Consumer Expenditure Survey data. They show that giving curves and elasticity models measure different phenomena and investigate ways that the information in each might be combined to enrich future studies of charitable giving.

Taxes, Subsidies, and Listeners Like You: Public Policy and Contributions to Public Radio

Public radio in the United States receives both direct and indirect government funding. Direct subsidies come in the form of lump-sum and matching grants, while indirect subsidies proceed from tax revenues forgone on tax-deductible private donations. Each of these sources of government money affects charitable giving to public radio. This article estimates both of these effects, using data on 91 public radio stations in the United States during 1995. Data analysis shows that public funding to stations has a positive impact on private giving, but this impact rapidly decreases as the level of government subsidies increases. The analysis also indicates that increases in state tax rates correspond with significantly higher donation levels. This article explores the implications of these and other findings for policy makers, public administrators, and nonprofit managers.

Does giving make us prosperous

Nonprofit economists have always assumed that income is a precursor to giving. In contrast, many philosophical and religious teachings have asserted that it is giving that leads to prosperity. This article seeks to test the non-economic hypothesis, using data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. It identifies strong evidence that money giving does, in fact, influence income. This is consistent with extant psychology research which clearly shows that volunteering leads to positive mental and physical health outcomes. The implication of these findings for researchers and managers is that the value of charity is not limited to those who receive the services that giving makes possible. On the contrary, charity unleashes substantial benefits to the givers themselves.

The One-Man Band by the Quick Lunch Stand: Modeling Audience Response to Street Performance

This paper considers street performance, or busking,focusing on differences between performance in thisenvironment compared with the standard concertsetting. First, in contrast with a set, known ticketprice, the price of street performance isendogenously determined. Second, busking generallyinvolves a joint product: music and charity, wherecharity is produced internally by the audience andhas as its principal input the price paid for music.We show that these facts call into question somegeneral conclusions of conventional public financemodels, which suggest that the major efficiency problemwith busking is its inability to preventfreeriding behavior, and that freeriding, while efficient at the individuallevel, is inefficient at the societal level. In contrast, we argue in thispaper that busking, with freeriding and all, is not unambiguously inferior toconcert hall performance in terms of efficiency.

Challenges and Opportunities Facing Nonprofit Organizations

Books reviewed in this article: Lester M. Salamon (ed.), The State of Nonprofit America Peter Frumkin, On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer Paul C. Light, Pathways to Nonprofit Excellence

Public Opinion and the Role of Government Arts Funding in Spain

While several studies have probed the determinants of public support for government funding of arts and culture in the United States, little work to date has addressed the question in Europe. Yet as private cultural funding increases in magnitude in most Western European countries, the answer to this question has policy implications. This article formalizes the theory of the determinants of this public support in a model, employs public opinion data from Spain to estimate this model, and compares the results with those from the U.S. I find that support in Spain increases strongly with age, but is insignificant in most other variables. The articles empirical results yield several lessons for cultural policy design.