The Effects of Nonprofit Reputation on Charitable Giving: A Survey Experiment

A nonprofit’s reputation is a crucial intangible asset that can bring significant benefits to the organization. Using a multidimensional framework, this study tested the effects of three dimensions of nonprofit reputation—financial efficiency, media visibility, accreditation status—on charitable giving behavior. The findings of this 2 × 2 × 2 full-factorial survey experiment show that each of the reputation dimensions has a significant individual effect on giving behavior. Furthermore, financial efficiency and accreditation status have an interaction effect on giving behavior. The findings also demonstrate the cross-level interaction between financial efficiency and the real-life giving behavior of individuals and between accreditation and the real-life volunteering behavior. This study provides implications for our understanding of the components of nonprofit reputation and their impact on charitable giving.

     

Capitalizing the Crisis? Explanatory Factors for the Design of Short‐time Work across Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development Countries

This article looks at the financial and economic crisis 2008–10 in 18 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development states and seeks to investigate explanatory paths for the subsidization of further education within short‐time work programmes. Several hypotheses are put to the test: first, a classical partisan difference argument; second, a varieties of capitalism approach proposing a successful joint rallying of employers and employees for subsidization in coordinated market economies; and, lastly, the merged hypothesis that right‐wing parties in a coordinated economic context might subsidize feeling the pressure to overcompensate an ‘issue ownership’ of left parties in the field of employee‐friendly policies. We identify four explanatory paths: coordinated economies in the sample subsidized when they were economically closed or highly indebted. The results also support our combined hypothesis, that New Zealand – a left‐governed liberal market economy – and right‐governed coordinated market economies of the non‐Scandinavian type subsidized.     

A Review of Recent Advances in Benchmark Dose Methodology

In this review, recent methodological developments for the benchmark dose (BMD) methodology are summarized. Specifically, we introduce the advances for the main steps in BMD derivation: selecting the procedure for defining a BMD from a predefined benchmark response (BMR), setting a BMR, selecting a dose–response model, and estimating the corresponding BMD lower limit (BMDL). Although the last decade has shown major progress in the development of BMD methodology, there is still room for improvement. Remaining challenges are the implementation of new statistical methods in user‐friendly software and the lack of consensus about how to derive the BMDL.     

City dwelling wild bees: how communal gardens promote species richness

Urban areas consist of wide expanses of impervious surfaces which are known to negatively affect insect biodiversity in general, but green spaces within cities have the potential to provide necessary habitat and foraging resources. Although, communal gardens were primarily intended to provide fresh, regional food to denizens, these green islands also host a surprisingly high number of wild bee species.

The gardens were characterized based on structural elements such as flower frequency, the relative percentage of lawn, trees, shrubs, planted crops and infrastructure (e.g. seating possibilities or garden houses). Further, the effects of different landscape structures surrounding the gardens and distance to the city center were analyzed on the total wild bee species richness and functional traits. Focusing on these putative influencing factors, statistical analyses calculating random decision forests along with generalized linear mixed models were applied. With 113 observed wild bee species, communal gardens provide habitat for a quarter of all known species in Vienna. In conclusion, results revealed that only elements within the gardens had an effect on species richness, with flower frequency as the major positive driver. The examined communal gardens promote and conserve wild bees independent from the location within the city or garden size. Furthermore, these green patches are important sanctuaries, hosting rare and threatened species as well as remarkably special wild bee communities.

     

Undutiful daughter(s): troubling geographies of the gendered nation and belonging in Adichie’s Americanah and Atta’s Everything Good Will Come

ABSTRACT

This paper proffers a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as a Bildungsroman that represents a moment of a daughter’s “undutifulness” to domesticating national patriarchies and cultures, textual and epistemic genealogies. In this regard, I posit Adichie’s twining of national romances and a heterosexual romantic love that travels and returns as a framework for examining gendered experiencing and relations to the “home.” The article considers the text’s representation of migration and return not simply as moments of re-domestication and formulaic reunification but as incidents that enunciate expanded relationalities to the nation and reconfigure domestic intimacies in a manner that radically unsettles “home.” Americanah is read alongside Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come in an attempt to show how the development of the protagonists’ interpersonal romances goes together with a studied engagement with the national space and communities in ways that inscribe women’s labours of love, care and intellect into the public domain and charts transformative possibilities of being in the world and inhabiting home. Ultimately, Adichie and Atta’s texts demonstrate alertness to celebrations of transnational black femininities, its vulnerabilities and bonds that transcend the limited “ethical” commitments delineated by the horizons of gendered roles and the national home.     

Environmental hazard and migration intentions in a coastal area in Ghana: a case of sea flooding

Recently, there has been significant debate about whether ‘environmental migration’ can constitute a form of adaptation to environmental change, as opposed to forced or flight migration. The Foresight Report on Migration and Environmental Change (2011) suggested environmental factors are one driver of migration, as well as political, social, economic and demographic drivers, and that—under the right conditions—migration can be a form of adaptation to changing climatic conditions. However, this is dependent on migrants having adequate social and financial capital to undertake beneficial types of migration; it further argues that environmental change may result in ‘trapped populations’ whereby people who lack the necessary resources to re-establish livelihoods elsewhere may be left exposed to increasingly severe environmental shocks and stresses in situ. Research on the climate-migration nexus in West Africa has largely focused on out-migration from the semi-arid Sahel with more limited evidence about how sea flooding interacts with migration flows. This paper attempts to help fill this knowledge gap. Using data from a representative survey of households across three coastal communities in Ghana’s Volta River Delta, this paper concludes that exposure to sea flooding may not be a primary cause of out-migration as other community, economic and political factors influence migration intentions and decisions. Thus, it is important for planned adaptation interventions to be strengthened in situ to enable households, particularly farming households, sustain their livelihoods.     

Maximum likelihood estimation for the generalized poisson distribution when sample mean is larger than sample variance

The generalized Poisson distribution (GPD), studied by many researchers and containing two parameters θ and λ, has been found to fit very well data sets arising in biological, ecological, social and marketing fields. Consul and Shoukri (1985) have shown that for negative values of λ the GPD gets truncated and the model becomes deficient; however, the truncation error becomes less than 0.0005 if the minimum number of non-zero probability classes ≥ 4 for all values of θ and λ and the GPD model can be safely used in all such cases. The problem of admissible maximum likelihood (ML) estimation when the sample mean is larger than the sample variance is considered in this paper which complements the earlier work of Consul and Shoukri (1984) on the existence of unique ML estimators of θ and λ when the sample mean is smaller than or equal to the sample variance.     

Parental Presence and Encouragement Do Not Influence Helping in Young Children

Young children begin helping others with simple instrumental problems from soon after their first birthdays. In previous observations of this phenomenon, both naturalistic and experimental, children’s parents were in the room and could potentially have influenced their behavior. In the two current studies, we gave 24‐month‐old children the opportunity to help an unfamiliar adult obtain an out‐of‐reach object when the parent (or a friendly female adult) (i) was present but passive, (ii) was present and highlighted the problem for the child, (iii) was present and actively encouraged the child to help, (iv) was present and ordered the child to help, or (v) was absent from the room. The children helped at relatively high levels and equally under all these treatment conditions. There was also no differential effect of treatment condition on children’s helping in a subsequent test phase in which no parent was present, and children had to disengage from a fun activity to help. Young children’s helping behavior is not potentiated or facilitated by parental behavior in the immediate situation, suggesting that it is spontaneous and intrinsically motivated.