Jonathan Meer

The Impact of Athletic Performance on Alumni Giving: An Analysis of Micro Data

An ongoing controversy in the literature on the economics of higher education centers on whether the success of a schools athletic program affects alumni donations. This paper uses a unique data set to investigate this issue. The data contain detailed information about donations made by alumni of a selective research university as well as a variety of their economic and de-mographic characteristics. One important question is how to characterize the success of an athletic program. We focus not only on the performance of the most visible teams, football and basketball, but also on the success of the team on which he or she played as an undergraduate. One of our key findings is that the impact of athletic success on donations differs for men and women. When a male graduates former team wins its conference championship, his donations for general purposes increase by about 7 percent and his donations to the athletic program increase by about the same percentage. Football and basketball records generally have small and statistically insignificant effects; in some specifications, a winning basketball season reduces donations. For women there is no statistically discernible effect of a former teams success on current giving; as is the case for men, the impacts of football and basketball, while statistically significant in some specifications, are not important in magnitude. Another novel result is that for males, varsity athletes whose teams were successful when they were undergraduates subsequently make larger donations to the athletic program. For example, if a male alumnuss team won its conference championship during his senior year, his subsequent giving to the athletic program is about 8 percent a year higher, ceteris paribus.

The Effects of Transactions Costs and Social Distance: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Abstract We use data from a field experiment at Kiva, the online microfinance platform, to examine the role of transactions costs and social distance in decision-making. Requests for loans are either written in English or another language, and our treatment consists of posting requests in the latter category with or without translation. We find evidence that relatively small transactions costs have a large effect on the share of funding coming from speakers of languages other than that in which the request was written. Social distance plays a smaller role in funding decisions.

Does fundraising create new giving

Despite an extensive literature on the impacts of a variety of charitable fundraising techniques, little is known about whether these activities increase overall giving or merely cause donors to substitute away from other causes. Using detailed data from Donorschoose.org, an online platform linking teachers with prospective donors, I examine the extent to which matching grants for donations to certain requests affect giving to others. Eligibility for matches is determined in entirely by observable attributes of the request, providing an exogenous source of variation in incentives to donate between charities. I find that, while matches increase giving to eligible requests, they do not appear to crowd out giving to similar ones, either contemporaneously or over time.

The Impact of Teacher–Student Gender Matches: Random Assignment Evidence from South Korea

Gender disparities in academic performance may be driven in part by the interaction of teacher and student gender, but systematic sorting of students into classrooms makes it difficult to identify causal effects. We use the random assignment of students to Korean middle school classrooms and show that the female students perform substantially better on standardized tests when assigned to female teachers; there is little effect on male students. We find evidence that teacher behavior drives the increase in female students’ achievement.

Are overhead costs a good guide for charitable giving

Las agencias de calificación a menudo evalúan a las organizaciones benéficas en función de sus gastos generales, y los donantes parecen tener en cuenta estas mediciones al decidir a quién entregar su donativo. Pero parece ser que la conexión entre esta métrica y la eficacia de la organización benéfica es débil. Los datos revelan que con la atención en los gastos generales, las organizaciones benéficas no invierten en funciones importantes, como en trabajadores cualificados. Para evaluar las políticas que regulan los gastos generales, es necesario analizar si los donantes se preocupan por ellos, si pueden medir la eficacia de la organización, y cómo afecta a la organización el hecho de que se preste atención a los gastos generales.Charity-Rating-Agenturen konzentrieren sich bei der Bewertung von Wohltätigkeitsorganisationen oft auf die Overheadoder Gemeinkostenquote, und viele Spender orientieren sich daran. Über die tatsächliche Effektivität einer Organisation sagt dieses Maß jedoch wenig aus. Vielmehr gibt es Hinweise darauf, dass bei einem zu starken Fokus auf Verwaltungskosten an der falschen Stelle gespart wird, beispielsweise an qualifiziertem Personal. Um politische Vorgaben zu Kostenquoten bewerten zu können, gilt es zu analysieren, inwieweit sich Spender an den Gemeinkosten orientieren, ob sie ein gutes Maß für Effektivität sind und welche Folgen sich für die gemeinnützige Arbeit ergeben.

The Great Recession and charitable giving

ABSTRACT We examine the impact of the Great Recession on charitable giving. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate a variety of specifications and find sharp declines in overall donative behaviour that is not accounted for by shocks to income or wealth. These results suggest that overall attitudes towards giving changed over this time period.