Does Who Decides Really Matter? Causes and Consequences of Personal Financial Management in the Case of Larger and Structural Charitable Donations

We study causes and consequences of financial management in households in the specific case of charitable giving. We test hypotheses using couples in the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Study (n = 1,101). We find that more relationship specific investments lead to deciding on charitable giving as one economic actor. Furthermore, we find that the partner with the highest relative educational resources has most decision making power over charitable donations. Separately deciding couples are smallest charitable donors. Households in which the male partner decides are largest charitable donors when only larger and more structural donations are considered. This can be explained by their more conservative religious denomination.     

Policy transfer routes: an evidence-based conceptual model to explain policy adoption

Although studies on policy transfer have expanded, a general and comprehensive understanding of policy transfer is lacking. This study offers an evidence-based explanation of policy transfer processes. We extracted constraining and facilitating factors from 180 empirical studies using PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis) and aggregated these factors into a conceptual framework. We synthesize our findings in four “transfer routes”. We conclude that actors could shape a subset of those factors by taking certain decisions regarding transferability, adoptability and process design, albeit within the boundaries of the environment.     

Beneficial effects of the mother's voice on infants’ novel word learning

The maternal voice appears to have a special role in infants’ language processing. The current eye‐tracking study investigated whether 24‐month‐olds (n = 149) learn novel words easier while listening to their mother's voice compared to hearing unfamiliar speakers. Our results show that maternal speech facilitates the formation of new word–object mappings across two different learning settings: a live setting in which infants are taught by their own mother or the experimenter, and a prerecorded setting in which infants hear the voice of either their own or another mother through loudspeakers. Furthermore, this study explored whether infants’ pointing gestures and novel word productions over the course of the word learning task serve as meaningful indexes of word learning behavior. Infants who repeated more target words also showed a larger learning effect in their looking behavior. Thus, maternal speech and infants’ willingness to repeat novel words are positively linked with novel word learning.     

Book Review: Cross-Border Philanthropy: An Exploratory Study of International Giving in the United Kingdom,United States,Germany and Japan,by Helmut K. Anheier and Regina List (eds.). Johns Hopkins University/Centre for Civil Society,Baltimore, 2000

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Computational Social Science for Nonprofit Studies: Developing a Toolbox and Knowledge Base for the Field

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - How can computational social science (CSS) methods be applied in nonprofit and philanthropic studies? This paper...