The Missing Tax Benefit of Donor-Advised Funds

The second largest charitable organization in the country in terms of annual money raised is not the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, or the YMCA— it’s Fidelity Investments. The sixth largest is Charles Schwab Corp. Vanguard Group Inc. is No. 10. Needless to say, Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard are not running hospitals or soup kitchens. Rather, they are the three largest sponsoring organizations of donor-advised funds (DAFs). DAFs are accounts established by contributions from charitable donors to a sponsoring organization that pools and manages many different DAFs. The DAF then makes distributions to operating charities based on the advice of the donor. Because the sponsoring organizations are, by definition, described within section 170(c), contributions by a donor into a DAF are tax deductible. Importantly, the DAF need not make any distributions immediately for the original donor to receive the deduction. Because the donation is to the sponsoring organization itself, and the sponsoring organization is a charitable organization, the original gift is fully deductible

A Hierarchical Game with Strategy Evolution for Mobile Sponsored Content and Service Markets

In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the mobile users, the content/service providers and the network operator, as a two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers' grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence, and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers' profits and the users' experience

Summary results of the Industry Conference on the Commercial Use of Space

The future intentions of the Federal Republic of Germany in the area of the commercialization of space are presented. It is shown that significant advances in microgravity research, particulary in the areas of materials science, composite materials, physical chemistry, crystal growth, biology, and process engineering will have an effect on future plans for establishing sponsoring organizations to guide commercial interests in German space research. An organizational and functional outline of a proposed sponsoring organization to promote space commercialization under German supervision, including the objectives, the target group to be served, and the administrative structure, is presented. The role of the DFVLR (German Aerospace Research Establishment) and the BMFT (German Ministry for Research and Technology) as sponsoring organizations representing the interests of the German government is shown

Pension fund finance and sponsoring companies: Empirical evidence on theoretical hypotheses

This study presents empirical evidence on the influence of sponsoring companies on the funding and portfolio allocation of pension funds, an issue on which most extant literature is theoretical. We use a unique microdataset of 550 Dutch defined benefit company pension funds and 100 sponsoring firms over 1996-2005 to test the relevance of the main theoretical hypotheses, the first paper to do so in a comprehensive manner. We find that pension funds have lower cover ratios when (1) their sponsoring company is highly leveraged, (2) the fund’s return on assets is relatively low, and (3) the sponsoring firm is small. Further, defined benefit pension funds are found to invest more in shares when their sponsoring companies are highly leveraged. These links in general suggest higher risk in the sponsor leads to correspondingly higher risk in the fund, and warrant close attention by regulators

Creative Disruption: Sabbaticals for Capacity Building and Leadership Development in the Nonprofit Sector

Based on a survey, examines the outcomes of sabbaticals for nonprofit leaders, their organizations, leadership transitions, and sponsoring foundations, as well as lessons learned and challenges. Includes case studies

Corporate Philanthropy in the Czech and Slovak Republics

The authors analyze corporate charitable behavior and the motivation for it in the Czech and Slovak Republics. In their quantitative study they distinguish different channels of support: sponsoring and giving. They do not find evidence supporting the usual claim that foreign firms give more than domestic ones, but the results suggest that foreign firms give to maximize profits more often than domestic ones. The Czech Republic leads in giving over Slovakia, where the importance of large and international firms is higher. No significant decline in giving is found in Slovakia after changes in its tax legislation made giving more expensive.corporate philanthropy, corporate giving, sponsoring, survey data, economic transformation, tax treatment

Emplacement of sandstone intrusions during contractional tectonics

Acknowledgments We acknowledge the support of sponsoring companies of Phase 3 of the Sand Injection Research Group (SIRG). We are very grateful to John Waldron and Jessica Ross for the constructive reviews of the manuscript. We also wish to thank and acknowledge the continuing help and access provided by the Bureau of Land Management.Peer reviewedPostprin

Sponsoring, brand value and social media

The increasing involvement of individuals in social media over the past decade has enabled firms to pursue new avenues in communication and sponsoring activities. Besides general research on either social media or sponsoring, questions regarding the consequences of a joint activity (sponsoring activities in social media) remain unexplored. Hence, the present study analyses whether the perceived image of the brand and the celebrity endorser credibility of a top sports team influence the perceived brand value of the sponsoring firm in a social media setting. Moreover, these effects are compared between existing customers and non-customers of the sponsoring firm. Interestingly, perceived celebrity endorser credibility plays no role in forming brand value perceptions in the case of the existing customers. Implications for marketing theory and practice are derived. (authors' abstract

Decisions regarding infringements of sponsoring provisions

status: publishe