Does Generosity Beget Generosity? Alumni Giving and Undergraduate Financial Aid

We investigate how undergraduates’ financial aid packages affect their subsequent dona-tive behavior as alumni. The empirical work is based upon a rich set of micro data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we call Anon U. We focus on three types of financial aid, scholarships, loans, and campus jobs. A novel aspect of our modeling strategy is that, consistent with the view of some professional fundraisers, we allow the receipt of a given form of aid per se to affect alumni giving. At the same time, our model allows the amount of the support to affect giving behavior nonlinearly. Our main findings are: 1) Individuals who took out student loans are less likely to make a gift, other things being the same. Further, individuals who take out large loans make smaller con-tributions as alumni, conditional on making a gift. This effect is unlikely to be due to the fact that repaying the loan reduces the alumnus’s capacity to give. We conjecture that, rather, it is caused by an “annoyance effect” — alumni resent the fact that they are burdened with loans. 2) Scholar-ship aid reduces the size of a gift, conditional on making a gift, but has little effect on the proba-bility of making a donation. Students who received scholarships are also less likely to be in the top 10 percent of givers in their class in a given year. The negative effect of receiving a scholar-ship on the amount donated decreases in absolute value with the size of the scholarship. Again, we do not find any evidence of income effects, i.e., that scholarship recipients give less because they have relatively low incomes post graduation. 3) Aid in the form of campus jobs does not have a strong effect on donative behavior.alumni, donations, financial aid, college

Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium

We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16th-century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c. 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as “Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers”, suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, “Cibo”, Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book’s watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542–1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16th-century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial “Erbario Cibo” kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely “hidden” in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums

Unwrapping the Deadweight Loss of Gift Giving

anonymous referees of this journal and seminar participants at Ben-Gurion University, Universite Louis-Pasteur and the 1998 ESA meetings in Mannheim for comments. Unwrapping the Deadweight Loss of Gift Giving Two previous surveys used to measure the welfare implications of Christmas gift giving in the U.S. have reached opposite conclusions. Waldfogel (1993) nds a 10-33 % welfare reduction associated with Christmas giving. Curiously, Solnick and Hemenway's (1996) (henceforth S&H) replication of Waldfogel's survey turns up just the opposite result: a 214 % welfare gain. We design a series of controlled laboratory experiments to determine why thetwopapers arrive at opposite conclusions. We do not produce our own estimate of the deadweight lossofgift giving; rather, our aim is to understand how, and which among, the di erences in methodology between the two studies account for their divergent ndings. Waldfogel (1993) surveyed 58 students enrolled in an intermediate microeconomics class about speci c gifts they had received for Christmas. In addition to eliciting details about the gifts received, the recipient's background, and her relationship to the gift giver, Waldfogel asked recipients to estimate the amount paid by the giver for each gift received. Finally, recipients were asked to place avalue on each gift they received. Respondents were instructed to estimate the value of a gift as the...amountofcashsuch that you are indi erent between the gift and the cash, not counting the sentimental value of the gift. (Waldfogel, 1993, p.1331) Waldfogel measures the welfare yield of a gift as the di erence between the re-1 cipient's valuation and her cost estimate of the gift. Based on 278 gifts reported, Waldfogel nds that gifts have anaverage yield of 87.1%, indicating that gifts lose about 13 % of their value in the exchange from giver to receiver. When cash gifts are excluded, the average yield falls further to 83.9%. 1 S&H were intrigued enough byWaldfogel's results to replicate his study. Contrar

Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium

We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16th-century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c. 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as “Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers”, suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, “Cibo”, Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book’s watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542–1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16th-century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial “Erbario Cibo” kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely “hidden” in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums

The ABCs of Charitable Solicitation

The “iron law of fundraising” says that people do not donate to a charity unless they are asked. We test the iron law using observational data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we refer to as Anon U. At Anon U, volunteers use lists provided by the Devel-opment Office to telephone classmates and solicit them for donations. The names on these lists are always in alphabetical order. The volunteers who do the soliciting often run out of time be-fore they reach the end of their lists, and conditional on reaching the end of their lists, the solici-tations are likely to be done with less energy and enthusiasm. These observations suggest a sim-ple strategy for testing whether solicitation matters, viz., examine whether alumni with names toward the end of the alphabet are less likely to give than alumni with names toward the begin-ning, ceteris paribus. If so, then solicitation matters. Our main finding is that location in the alphabet--and hence, solicitation-- has a strong ef-fect on probability of making a gift, but not on the amount given, conditional on donating. This result is consistent with a theoretical model of charitable behavior developed by Andreoni and Payne [2003], in which solicitation reduces the transaction cost of making a gift. Our finding is also in line with a model in which individuals donate to charities in order to avoid the solicitor’s disapproval. In this case, the donation per se is perceived as eliminating the stigma; the amount given, conditional on giving, has no additional impact. We also find that women respond more strongly to solicitation than men. This is consistent with a robust result in the psychology litera-ture, that women find it more difficult than men to refuse requests that they perceive as being legitimate.

Музика при дворах Речі Посполитої ХVІІ ст. Потреба чи розкіш?

The article analyses two texts from the period: 1. An anonymous poem from the 1620s– 1630s Description of the Music Presented as Gift to Master Stefan Przypkowski at His Wedding Feast, preserved in manuscript at the Kórnik Library (shelf number 95), written on the occasion of the wedding feast during which, contrary to general custom, there was no music, which the author aimed to compensate for with his poem, enumerating 38 different instruments (belonging to high western culture, folk and oriental instruments and even a comb) playing for the newly weds. 2. Exorbitanciae, or On Things Harmful in Every Kingdom […] by Piotr Widawski Wężyk (Cracow 1603), reprinted in 1640 and 1649 and propagated in anonymous copies particularly during the Chmielnicki Rebellion; this criticised the lifestyle of the wealthier groups of Polish society, particularly the gentry trying to imitate the magnates and wasting resources which could be used for the defence of the Commonwealth on the splendour, also music. The author suggests a need to introduce a special tax on luxury, this also including a band and particular instrumentalists

Homer Foundation - 2006 Annual Report

Contains mission statement, board chair's and director's messages, program information, financial statements, reports from the distributions and investment committees, grants list, donors list, and list of board members