CATEGORY REPORTING IN CHARITABLE GIVING: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

We examine the effect of category reporting on charitable giving, aiming to disentangle the publicity effect from the category effect. We compare subjects' donation decisions under three reporting plans: category reporting, where an honored category is prespecified and qualifying subjects were publicly acknowledged; category no reporting, where the same category was utilized but the qualifying donors were not publicly acknowledged; and no reporting, where neither category setting nor public reporting was utilized. We found that category reporting significantly increased average donations relative to no reporting, and that this superiority was due to the dual presence of the category setting and the public reporting. The category setting anchors donations toward the category threshold and increased the average donations when the threshold was modestly set. The public reporting, on the other hand, only worked at the highest category level. It further increased the donations by providing extra social‐image benefits. (JEL C90, C91, D64, H00)     

EDUCATION'S GAMBLING PROBLEM: EARMARKED LOTTERY REVENUES AND CHARITABLE DONATIONS TO EDUCATION

I examine the impact that lotteries introduced to support education have on voluntary contributions to education. State lotteries, and the causes they are introduced to support, are highly publicized. This provides the opportunity to assess whether donors are crowded‐out by government spending of which they are almost certainly aware. Using donor‐level survey data and nonprofits' tax returns, I find that donations to education‐related organizations fall with the introduction of a lottery. This result is driven by donors' response to the new (highly publicized) government revenue source (rather than a decrease in nonprofit fundraising efforts). (JEL D64, H3, H75)     

HOW EDUCATION AFFECTS ATTITUDE TO PROTEST:

In a previous study, the authors found that among whites education affected attitude to protest in four ways: by raising commitment to civil liberties; by reducing support for violence; by increasing knowledge of protest justifications; and by altering a person's position in society, hence one's interests and identifications. This study shows that the same set of forces accounts for the variability of correlations between education and protest attitudes among samples of black respondents. Differences in the results among blacks as compared to whites chiefly relate to issue-specific protests. Here results diverge because black experience serves as an alternative to formal education for increasing awareness of protest justifications and identification with protestors.     

WARM‐GLOW GIVING: EARNED MONEY AND THE OPTION TO TAKE

Giving in dictator games has been shown to vary with the nature of the endowment (earned vs. house money) and the action space (give only vs. the option to give or take). This article is the first to test if these factors similarly affect warm‐glow giving alone. There is no reason that one would expect the same outcomes given that the motivations for warm‐glow giving are different from the motivations for total (warm‐glow plus purely altruistic) giving. We find that warm‐glow giving to charity or philanthropic institutions in a real‐donation experiment increases when the endowment is earned. The option to take does reduce warm‐glow giving to charity, but significant giving remains. Our results suggest that donating earned income creates greater utility than donating an equal amount from a windfall gain, and that warm glow comes not merely from the act of giving, but also from the characteristics of the recipient. (JEL C90, D64, H41)     

HOW TO HAGGLE and TO STAY FIRM: BARTER AS HIDDEN PRICE DISCRIMINATION

Barter transactions, conducted openly by established corporations, play an increasingly significant role in the U.S. economy. The model developed here helps explain why firms use barter and yields predictions concerning the circumstances under which barter is likely to occur. It is shown that when two firms barter goods used as inputs, price discrimination occurs. This price discrimination is hidden from the firms' other customers because the real values of the transacted goods to the barterers are different from the accounting prices used in the transaction. Since price discrimination that is observed by potential customers might have an adverse effect on the selling firm's future bargaining power, barter will have value as a means of hiding price discrimination.     

ASSESSING ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY: HOW THE CONCLUSIONS WE DRAW VARY ACCORDING TO THE DEFINITIONS WE EMPLOY

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates that the conclusions environmental inequality researchers draw vary according to the definitions of environmental inequality they employ and that researchers can use a single set of results to test for the existence of multiple forms of environmental inequality. In order to illustrate these points, I set forth five definitions of environmental inequality, list the kinds of evidence we must obtain in order to determine whether each form of environmental inequality exists, and show how conclusions drawn from several recent environmental inequality studies vary depending on the definition of environmental inequality we employ. My goal is not to show that any one definition is superior to the others; nor am I trying to generalize from the studies reported here to a broader set of research findings. Instead, my goal is to a) show that we can use a single set of results to address a variety of environmental justice concerns and b) demonstrate that our interpretations of environmental inequality research have been too narrowly focused on one set of environmental inequality outcomes.     

POVERTY,PRICES, AND PLACE: HOW SENSITIVE IS THE SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF POVERTY TO COST OF LIVING ADJUSTMENTS?

This article examines how accounting for cost-of-living differences across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas affects measured rates of poverty. The spatial price index used is based on the Fair Market Rent data and was developed by the Census Bureau for use in its experimental poverty research program. Following U.S. federal definitions, poverty in nonmetro areas has been consistently higher than it has been in metro areas. Using the Fair Market Rent index to adjust for differences in cost of living results in a complete reversal of nonmetro-metro rankings in terms of prevalence, depth, and severity of poverty for every year examined (1991 to 2002). (JEL I32 , R1 , C81 )