Practical Considerations for Choosing Between Tobit and SCLS or CLAD Estimators

Practical considerations for choosing between Tobit, symmetrically censored least squares (SCLS) and censored least absolute deviations (CLAD) estimators are offered. Practical considerations deal with when a Hausman test is better than a conditional moment test for judging the severity of a misspecification, the need to bootstrap the sampling distributions of the Hausman tests, what to look for in a graphical examination of the residuals and the limited value of SCLS. The practical considerations are applied to a model of the intergenerational transmission of charitable giving using new data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The paper shows how to use relative distribution methods to calculate CLAD-based marginal effects on the observable dependent variable

Giving to Organizations that Help People in Need: Differences Across Denominational Identities

This article reports the results of an analysis of charitable giving to basic necessity organizations that help people in need of food, shelter, or other basic necessities (e.g., Feeding America, the local food bank or homeless shelter, Habitat for Humanity, etc.)—and asks whether giving to such organizations varies across denominational identities. I answer this question using data from three waves of the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study, a module within the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that enables three innovative analyses. The Center Panel is the first survey to collect data on dollar amounts given specifically to necessity organizations, enabling an analysis of the magnitude of giving as well as the probability of giving. Moreover, it is possible to estimate dollar amounts given beyond what people with denominational identities give to their church, synagogue, mosque, or other place of worship. In addition, because the Center Panel is part of the PSID, how giving to necessity organizations differs across families with different denominational identities can be estimated using regressions that contain high-quality controls for differences in families’ income and wealth. This is important because income and wealth differ across denominational identities (Keister 2003, 2008) and failure to adequately control for income and wealth would lead to spurious findings. Finally, the Center Panel prospectively collects multiple years of giving data, enabling us to present the first analysis of giving to necessity organizations over a multiple-year period. This is important because there likely is a strong year-to-year dynamic in giving to necessity organizations, just as there is in aggregate giving (Rooney, Brown, and Wu 2007)

Family Structure and Income During Childhood and Subsequent Prosocial Behavior in Young Adulthood

Models of young adults’ prosocial behavior—charitable giving and volunteering—are estimated as functions of family structure and income during the stages of childhood. Estimating a model of any subsequent outcome (prosocial or otherwise) as a function of stage-specific family structure and income imposes a set of restrictions on the underlying dynamic model of the child development process. Such restrictions have been implicitly and unknowingly imposed by the family structure specifications used in past research, and in some cases the past restrictions may not be sensible a priori. We consider several specifications used in past research, propose several new specifications with a priori sensible restrictions, and use Bayesian model comparison methods to choose among them. The models are estimated using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its new module the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study. The results indicate that the development of charitable giving and volunteering behavior is associated with family instability and low income in adolescence

Tracking Giving Across Generations

In an article prepared for New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising, Richard Steinberg and Mark Wilhelm summarize the type of data collected in COPPS and provide at least four areas of fundraising practice that can be improved with knowledge gained about donors from COPPS: targeting, predicting, benchmarking, and persuasion

Religious and Secular Giving, by Race and Ethnicity

In this article, the authors advance the literature on whether apparent differences in the giving and volunteering of black versus white, or Hispanic versus other families, are real. They employ new data, COPPS, that help to determine whether the differences are due to race and ethnicity themselves or a variety of factors that are correlated with these labels

Identifying Tax Effects on Charitable Giving

This paper estimates the effects of three federal tax acts—the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (H.R. 1836), the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (H.R. 2), and the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004 (H.R. 1308)—on charitable giving, and offers four extensions relative to previous work. First, we use new data—the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study, the philanthropy module in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics—that permit the estimation of the effect of switches in itemization status on giving. This is important because switches permit a direct answer to the question: How much of an increase in charitable giving is caused by tax deductibility? Second, the new data permit the estimation of tax effects on charitable giving to secular charities as well as to religious organizations. This is important because the main policy question in the literature on taxes and giving is to evaluate “treasury efficiency”—whether the Treasury can cause more money to flow to charitable organizations by allowing deductibility of giving than by eliminating deductibility and sending the increased tax revenue directly to charitable organizations. By using secular giving, we can focus on the type of giving most relevant to this policy question. Third, the new data allow for improved methodological approaches over past studies. Fourth, we argue that the 2001, 2003, and 2004 federal tax acts were timed such that they provide a set of tax changes suitable for identifying permanent effects of taxes on giving. The estimates based on the analysis of families who switch itemization status suggest that secular giving is price elastic, implying that treasury efficiency holds. In contrast, estimates which impose the restrictions facing other datasets suggest a statistically insignificant price elasticity

The Distribution of Giving in Six Surveys

Despite widespread interest in philanthropy across social science disciplines and among policy-makers and practitioners it was not until the late 1980s that data on individual giving began to be regularly collected. Since that time several different surveys have been fielded, but these have produced very different measurements of the percentage of households making gifts and the amounts of those gifts. This paper examines six major household surveys of giving and attempts to trace these differences in measurement to underlying differences in survey methodology

Women Give 2014

In America today fewer individuals are affiliating with organized religion; in fact, one-third of Americans under 30 have no religious affiliation. For those concerned that the falling rate of religious affiliation will have an adverse effect on individual charitable giving, Women Give 2014 finds encouraging results

Does Jewish Philanthropy Differ by Sex and Type of Giving?

Little has been written on the role of gender in Jewish philanthropy, and there is even less empirical research on gender differences between Jewish men and women, or between Jews and non-Jews by gender. This study examines Jewish philanthropy by type of giving and gender. Specifically, we examine the differing amounts given to charity (both religious and secular) across eight groups, controlling for other factors that may affect philanthropic giving. These included four groups of married couples: those consisting of two Jewish spouses, of a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman, of a non-Jewish man and a Jewish woman, and of two non-Jewish spouses; and four groups of singles: Jewish men, Jewish women, non-Jewish men and non-Jewish women. Using three waves of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we used regression methods to examine the differences among the groups. Results indicated that the probability of giving and the amount given among Jewish women married to non-Jewish men are significantly less than among all other groups

Why Do People Give? Testing Pure and Impure Altruism

Researchers measure crowd-out around one level of charity output to identify whether giving is motivated by altruism and/or warm-glow. However, crowd-out depends on output, implying first that the power to reject pure altruism varies, and second that a single measurement of incomplete crowd-out can be rationalized by many different preferences. By instead measuring crowd-out at different output levels, we allow both for identification and for a novel and direct test of impure altruism. Using a new experimental design, we present the first empirical evidence that, consistent with impure altruism, crowd-out decreases with output