does microfinance reduce rural poverty evidence based on household panel data from northern ethiopia evidence on the long term impacts of microfinance credit is scarce we use a unique four round panel dataset on farm households in northern ethiopia that had access to microfinance observed on two key poverty indicators household consumption and housing improvements fixed effects and random trend models are used to reduce potential selection biases due to time invariant unobserved heterogeneity and individual trends therein results show that borrowing indeed causally increased consumption and housing improvements a flexible specification that takes into account repeated borrowings also suggests that borrowing has cumulative long term effects on these outcomes implying that short term impact estimates may underestimate credit effects

measuring program impacts on earnings and employment do unemployment insurance wage reports from employers agree with surveys of individuals this article attempts to determine whether wage records reported by employers to state unemployment insurance ui agencies provide a valid alternative to more costly retrospective sample surveys o

determinants of donations in private nonprofit markets abstract we estimate the responsiveness of donations to a number of economic variables including price advertising and the availability of revenue from such other sources as government grants and program service sales utilizing a set of irs data on individual nonprofit organizations in each of seven industries including hospitals and higher education for the years 1982 1994 we find distinct overall patterns as well as notable variation across industries a nonprofit organization s fundraising expenditures are estimated to exert two countervailing effects on donations the direct advertising and information effect augments donations while the indirect effect on the price of donating has a negative effect we do not find evidence that fundraising is carried to the profit maximizing levels in some industries fundraising is substantially short of that level while in other industries it is excessive implying that the marginal return to fundraising is exceeded by the cost focusing on whether revenue from other sources affects donations to a nonprofit organization we find evidence that revenue from either government grants or from the organization s own program sales activity generally does not crowd out private donations to the contrary in most industries there are significant positive effects

does microcredit increase household welfare in the absence of microinsurance summary this study answers the question does a combination of microcredit and microinsurance improve the wellbeing of low income households we examine this challenge through heckman sample selection instrumental variable and treatment effect models the findings indicate that households using microcredit in combination with microinsurance derive significant gains in terms of welfare improvement microcredit may be good but its benefit to the poor is enhanced and sustained if the poverty trapping risks are covered with microinsurance to this extent combining microcredit with microinsurance will empower the poor to make a sustainable exit from poverty

demand for charity donations in private non profit markets the case of the u k abstract this paper presents estimates of the demand for donations for u k charities in 1985 these estimates make demand depend upon price fund raising expenditure a quality index and alternative revenue sources the price elasticity of donations found here shows for the most part an elastic response and is consistent with previous studies using u s data our empirical results suggest that non profits in the u k unlike their counterparts in the u s are net revenue maximisers we discovered no significant evidence that public donations crowded out private donations in our sample of 300 charities

assessing the case for social experiments rs ecent academic debates pit two alternative approaches to policy evaluation against one another the first is the experimental approach based on the random assignment of accepted program applicants to a recipient or treatment group and a non recipient or control group the second is the nonexperimental or econometric approach that uses a variety of microdata sources statistical methods and behavioral models to compare the outcomes of participants in social programs with those of nonparticipants the central question addressed in this paper is whether or not randomized social experiments aid in securing answers to basic questions about the evaluation of social programs there are many distinct and complementary approaches to the study of the impact of public policy including full general equilibrium analysis of policy impacts tinbergen 1956 auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 shoven and whalley 1992 kydland and prescott 1991 and less ambitious partial equilibrium microeconomic structural research programs such as those designed to estimate the impact of taxes on labor supply both approaches offer answers to many interesting counterfactual policy questions but their credibility rests critically on the quality of the empirical input used to generate their answers

microfinance and poverty evidence using panel data from bangladesh micro finance supports mainly informal activities that often have low market demand it may be thus hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of micro finance in an economy with low economic growth is modest or nonexistent the observed borrower level poverty impact is then a result of income redistribution or short run income generation the author addresses these questions using household level panel data from bangladesh the findings confirm that micro finance benefits the poorest and has sustained impact in reducing poverty among program participants it also has positive spillover impact reducing poverty at the village level but the effect is more pronounced in reducing extreme rather than moderate poverty

why do people give testing pure and impure altruism abstract 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 jel d64 l31

demand for collective goods in private nonprofit markets can fundraising expenditures help overcome free rider behavior abstract economic theory ascribes the primary role in the provision of public goods to government this emphasis on government overlooks the role of the not for profit sector in providing collective type goods in this paper we seek to determine the factors influencing charitable contributions to private nonprofit organizations by estimating a demand function for the output of these collective good providers specifically we test the hypothesis that voluntary giving is responsive to conventional market variables such as advertising expenditures price and quality overall the results are strongly supportive

faith based charity and crowd out during the great depression abstract interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years churches in the u s were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the new deal in this paper we investigate the extent to which the new deal crowded out church charitable spending in the 1930s we do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large christian denominations matched to data on local new deal spending we instrument for new deal spending using measures of the political strength of a state s congressional delegation and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending with both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity crowd out was small as a share of total new deal spending 3 but large as a share of church spending our estimates suggest that benevolent church spending fell by 30 in response to the new deal and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939

efficient local charity with self selection how is charitable giving within a city influenced by the prospect of donor and recipient migration the theoretical literature on charitable contributions in a closed economy has mainly argued that the market level of private giving will tend to be lower than optimal wherever there exists a local fiscal externality between donors and recipients interjurisdictional models of voluntary redistribution on the other hand abstract from altruism to explore the interjurisdictional fiscal externality resulting from the failure of one community to account for the migration impacts of its actions on other communities this paper integrates and extends both literatures by allowing for local altruism among the mobile residents of a system of local economies within a single community mobility thus introduces adverse selection considerations for each donor via the migration of both recipients and other donors moreover any change in the local transfer level influences both equilibrium wages and donor behavior system wide

does the government crowd out private donations new evidence from a sample of non profit firms abstract during the 1980s government grants to non profit organizations declined dramatically and the price of private donations increased given there are different costs associated with government grants and private donations to non profits it is important to study the relationship between these two sources and determine whether government grants crowd out private donations i take a fresh look at the issue of crowd out and improve upon the literature by exploiting a panel data set that links private donations to non profit firms with the government grants they received i study 430 non profit shelter human services and other similar types of organizations that were in operation between 1982 and 1992 i find private donations to these non profits effectively do not change with changes in government grants after controlling for firm heterogeneity and political and economic factors under an ols specification in a 2sls specification after controlling for possible endogeneity of the government grants the estimated crowd out is significantly different from zero and one dollar on average the estimated crowd out is 50 cents

using nonprofit organization level financial data to infer managers fund raising strategies abstract using irs data from 1982 to 1994 this study finds the typical fund raising elasticities in seven categories of nonprofit organizations to be between zero and one these results are consistent with most nonprofit managers following intermediate strategies between pure program service maximization and pure organization size maximization however the distribution of fund raising elasticities contains extreme observations that can disproportionately affect mean elasticities and standard deviations as a result prior researchers tests of the difference of mean elasticities from zero may not properly characterize the behavior of typical nonprofit organizations

how giving affects giving a long term analysis of donations social preferences theories suggest that at least some people show altruistic behaviour however this philanthropic behaviour ranges from pure altruistic preferences to reluctant altruists the fa

kids or cash exploring charter school responses to declining government revenues while the literature is extensive on school districts revenue sources less research has been done on the impact of donations on school district funds in this paper we extend the theoretical literature on crowding out of private donations by government grants for one type of nonprofit firm namely charter schools the theoretical model leads us to focus on the key relationships among fundraising effort enrollment which is tied to federal and state funding and donations using a dataset on texas charter schools we adopt a two stage approach to examine the empirical relationship between changes in nondonor revenues and the donations received by charter schools like the extensive empirical estimates of the effects of government grants on donations for other types of nonprofit firms we find evidence of crowding out with respect to our sample of charter schools we also find a significant positive effect of fundraising on donations with a 1 increase in fundraising associated to a 0 58 increase in donations a pattern consistent with overinvestment in fundraising enrollments exhibit a robust inverse relationship to changes in nondonor revenues jel h00 h32 h50

labor market returns to the ged using regression discontinuity analysis we evaluate returns to general educational development ged certification for high school dropouts using state administrative data we apply a fuzzy regression discontinuity method to account for test takers retaking the test for women we find that ged certification has no statistically significant effect on either employment or earnings for men we find a significant increase in earnings in the second year after taking the test but no impact in subsequent years ged certification increases postsecondary school enrollment by 4 8 percentage points our results differ from regression discontinuity approaches that fail to account for test retaking

impact of microfinance on schooling evidence from poor rural households in bolivia summary channels for the influence of microfinance programs on a rural household s demand for schooling are identified income growth risk management child labor demand gender empowerment and parent information within a random utility framework a model of household consumption investment in education and borrowing suggests determinants at the individual household and regional levels of the probability of schooling gaps using data from two surveys of households of clients of microfinance organizations in bolivia regression models examine determinants of schooling gaps inferences about otherwise positive microfinance impacts identify potential negative effects of increased child labor demand which challenge usual assumptions and pose dilemmas for policymakers

estimating the labor market signaling value of the ged this paper tests the labor market signaling hypothesis for the general educational development ged equivalency credential using a unique data set containing ged test scores and social security administration ssa earnings data we exploit variation in ged status generated by differential state ged passing standards to identify the signaling value of the ged net of human capital effects our results indicate that the ged signal increases the earnings of young white dropouts by 10 to 19 percent we find no statistically significant effects for minority dropouts

high noon for microfinance impact evaluations re investigating the evidence from bangladesh recently microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified it such as pitt and khandker chemin applied propensity score matching to the pitt and khandker data finding different impacts but does not disaggregate by gender of borrower we first replicate chemin and extend his analysis in two ways we test the robustness of propensity score matching results to selection on unobservables using sensitivity analysis and we investigate propensity score matching estimates of impacts by gender of borrowers the mainly insignificant impacts of microfinance differ greatly by gender of borrower but are all vulnerable to selection on unobservables we are therefore not convinced that the relationships between microfinance and outcomes are causal with these data

the revealed objective functions of nonprofit firms although assertions have often been made about the objectives underlying the behavior of nonprofit firms there has been no empirical confirmation of these assertions this article proposes a way to infer a nonprofit organization s objective function by estimating the marginal donative product of its fundraising panel data estimates derived by using hildreth and houck s 1968 random coefficients model suggest that welfare education and arts firms are service maximizers that health firms are budget maximizers and that the objective of research firms cannot be ascertained within the family of objective functions considered

public radio in the united states does it correct market failure or cannibalize commercial stations because broadcasters can capture only part of the value of their product as revenue there is the potential for a classic problem of underprovision whether public support corrects a market failure depends on whether the market would have provided similar services in the absence of public broadcasting we address these questions by asking whether public and commercial classical stations compete for listening share and revenue as well as whether public stations crowd out commercial stations we find evidence that public broadcasting crowds out commercial programming in large markets particularly in classical music and to a lesser extent in jazz 1999 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

incidence of forest income on reduction of inequality evidence from forest dependent households in milieu of joint forest management abstract this study suggests that there is a narrower scope to expand income inequality with the increase in forest source of income to total income relative to non forest income irrespective of the type of forest fringe villages the addition of forest income after joint forest management jfm reduces measured income inequality by about 12 all else equal in the jfm involved households but no such perceptible decrease has been found for non jfm households during this period categorically forest income plays the dominant role in reducing measured income inequality for those households who are relatively asset poor and that also live below poverty line the study also shows that the non involvement in jfm programme by the non jfm households might bring about a major environmental shirking because illegal timber income constitutes the major part in total income for non jfm households even after jfm scenario

the impact of tax deductibility on charitable giving by covenant in the uk the 1985 86 survey of personal incomes is used to estimate the impact of tax deductibility on giving by covenant estimates are based on two models a generalized tobit model and reece and zieschang s 1985 model that allows for a nonlinear budget constraint the results suggest that the latter is not appropriate for the u k tax system in the tobit models the income effects on participation and expenditure are well determined and similar to those in previous work for the united kingdom and in many u s studies there is no robust evidence of a tax price effect on participation or expenditure copyright 1991 by royal economic society

charitable donations by uk households evidence from the family expenditure survey this paper reports estimates based on both standard tobit and generalized tobit techniques of the determinants of charitable giving in the uk using 1984 family expenditure survey data this is the first such study using uk data separate estimates are presented of the determinants of participation and of the level of donations by giving households participation is seen to be sensitive to income the tax price of giving and a range of demographic variables while the level of donations varies primarily with income donations are found to be inelastic with respect to changes in disposable income

the mystery of the vanishing benefits an introduction to impact evaluation this article provides an introduction to the concepts and methods of impact evaluation the author provides an intuitive explanation in the context of a concrete application the article takes the form of a short story about a fictional character s on the job training in evaluation ms speedy analyst is an economist in the ministry of finance in the fictional country of labas in the process of figuring out how to evaluate a human resource program targeted to the poor ms analyst learns the strengths and weaknesses of the main methods of ex post impact evaluation

an accurate measurement of the crowd out effect income effect and price effect for charitable contributions in the past empirical research on charitable contributions has focused on two issues estimating the income and price elasticities of contributions and estimating the extent to which government funding crowded out private contributions the two fundamental problems in all these studies are the differences in the underlying conceptual models and the use of imperfect data for empirical analysis this paper addresses both of these problems

does the g e d improve earnings estimates from a sample of both successful and unsuccessful g e d candidates the author uses a unique data set constructed from florida general education development certificate ged and unemployment insurance ui administrative records to estimate the relative earnings of two groups of male high school dropouts who took the ged exams in 1995 those who passed the exams obtaining the credential and those who failed the exams estimates from several different specifications all show greater mean quarterly earnings growth among those who obtained a ged than among unsuccessful candidates the advantage was small in dollar terms only about 1 400 annually six years after the exams but given the very low initial earnings of these school dropouts it was large in relative terms growing from zero immediately after the 1995 exams to 13 20 six years later most of these gains appear to reflect not differential wage growth between the two groups but a differential rate of movement from non employment to employment

charity donations in the uk new evidence based on panel data abstract this paper presents a set of panel data estimates for 159 of the most prominent uk charities for the period 1983 1990 in evaluating alternative specifications we settle on a fixed effects estimation social welfare charities are shown to fund raise short of the point at which net revenues are maximized whereas health and overseas charities are found to net revenue maximize religious charities maximize total revenues estimates of price and fund raising elasticities are presented for charities overall and for four cohorts for alternative income sources no evidence of crowding out is found

has regulation of charitable foundations thrown the baby out with the bath water abstract regulations to curb tax avoidance and evasion through charitable foundations have been in place since the tax reform act of 1969 newly compiled longitudinal data makes it possible to estimate the effects of these regulations by comparing affected and unaffected foundations before and after the reform donations and entry dropped precipitously proxy variables suggest significant deterrence of abuses but half of the decline in donations can be explained by the increased cost of running a foundation the results highlight the potential for large reductions in the benefits of regulation when the cost of compliance affects externality producing actions such as charitable giving

modeling charitable contributions of time and money abstract public goods theory predicts that government spending on charity can perfectly crowd out charitable contributions empirical research has found little support for the perfect crowd out hypothesis however the empirical work only measures part of a contributor s total contribution gifts of money contributors also volunteer labor this article extends the public goods model to the case in which individuals contribute both time and money to a charity that in turn produces a public good the model suggests that charitable contributions of time and money are perfectly substitutable in equilibrium this result offers new interpretations for existing empirical observations and suggests a new test of the crowd out hypothesis the implications of the model are empirically tested using a national survey of charitable activity

the robustness of kingma s crowd out estimate evidence from new data on contributions to public radio we revisit kingma s kingma 1989 journal of political economy 97 1197 1207 widely cited study of charitable contributions to public radio kingma s estimate of partial but statistically significant crowd out remains a benchmark in the literature because he was able to match household level contributions data with station level data on revenue including revenue from government grants to the best of our knowledge no comparable data have become available until now we replicate kingma s estimates with the original data and then apply the same methodology to very similar data from 1996 kingma s estimates are not robust to the use of the newer data

government growth and private contributions to charity we exploit the time series properties of charitable giving to provide additional insights into the relationship between charitable contributions and government spending cointegration tests reveal a significant long run relationship between several categories of charitable giving and government spending granger causality tests provide evidence on the short run giving and spending relationship evidence suggests that charitable contributions to education respond quite differently to state and local government education expenditures versus federal government expenditures we argue that the government spending and charitable giving relationship depends on the source of government revenue how this revenue is used and the rational ignorance of private donors

synergies between different types of agricultural technologies in the kenyan small farm sector abstractsustainable intensification of agriculture will have to build on various innovations but synergies between different types of technologies are not yet sufficiently understood we use repre

voluntary donations and public expenditures in a federal system proponents of the new federalism argue that nonprofit organizations and local governments will fully offset federal social service expenditure cutbacks the author analyzes this proposition as a competitive game in which donations are motivated by private and public good considerations the author characterizes the response of political economic equilibrium to exogenous changes in federal expenditures when local voters are cognizant of donor reactions partial replacement is the most likely outcome though others are possible copyright 1987 by american economic association

determinants and benefits of household level participation in rural drinking water projects in india abstract using data from households in 45 villages in rural india this paper finds that wealth literacy household and village size are often determinants of two measures of participation in community based development projects meeting attendance and capital cost contributions using propensity score matching this study concludes that participation leads to benefits for the households that participate although these benefits are strongest in regions with higher levels of overall participation this study finds no evidence of elite capture with both poor and wealthy households benefiting from their participation

impact assessment of policy oriented international agricultural research evidence and insights from case studies summary assessing the impact of policy oriented research is fraught with methodological difficulties ranging from attributing influence on policy change to constructing an appropriate counterfactual the six case studies in this special section address these challenges in the context of international agricultural research methodological and analytical lessons are drawn about the uptake and influence of policy oriented research on policy change and about the conduct of cost benefit analysis for such research the authors of the studies effectively used a key informant approach to document uptake and influence for policy reforms that were believed to have incorporated well defined outputs from policy research

an experimental test of warm glow giving abstract this paper reports the results of an experimental test of the warm glow hypothesis a participant is presented with the opportunity to contribute from her own endowment to a charity of choice the experiment is designed so that a pure altruist has no incentive to donate the amount the designated charity will receive is preset any contribution by the participant crowds out dollar for dollar giving by the proctor we find that participants on average donated 20 of their endowments and that approximately 57 of the participants made a donation

do tax incentives affect charitable contributions evidence from public charities reported revenues this paper estimates the effect of the charitable contribution tax deduction on charities donation revenue from charities tax filings a one percent increase in the tax cost of giving causes charitable receipts to fall by about four percent an effect three times larger the consensus in the literature further analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity in the tax response by subsector health care and home care are more tax sensitive than other charities while higher education and arts are less tax sensitive the results are consistent with substantial tax response heterogeneity within the sample and between sampled and unsampled charities implying that the mean tax elasticity of charitable contributions is a poor predictor of tax incentive effects for individual charities

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

is inflation targeting a good remedy to control inflation abstract since the 1990s inflation targeting it has been adopted by several central banks as a strategy for monetary policy it is expected that the adoption of this monetary regime can reduce inflation and inflation volatility this article is concerned with these issues and makes use of the propensity score matching methodology on a sample of 180 countries for the period from 1990 to 2007 for analysis the sample is split into two sets of countries advanced and developing the findings suggest that the adoption of it is an ideal monetary regime for developing economies and in addition to reducing inflation volatility can drive inflation down to internationally acceptable levels regarding advanced economies the adoption of it does not appear to represent an advantageous strategy in brief the empirical results indicate that the adoption of it is useful for countries that must enhance their credibility for the management of monetary policy

partners in giving the crowding in effects of uk government grants abstract this study examines the determinants of voluntary donations to uk charities using empirical specifications that combine error component and simultaneous equations methods in a series of tests we identify the one way fixed effects endogenous representation for government grants as the best empirical model when this endogeneity is taken into account government grants cause significant crowding in for the full sample and the two largest cohorts price coefficients are negative and fund raising coefficients are positive religion charities are net revenue maximizers whereas other charity cohorts fund raise short of net revenue maximization

do public grants to american theatres crowd out private donations this paper examines the relationship between public support and private donations by disaggregating the crowding effect into two components one determined by level of public support and one determined by changes in public support levels the analysis of a panel of american non profit theatres shows that the crowding effect induced by the level of public support takes an inverted u shape at low levels public support crowds in private donations while at higher levels it displaces them the change in total public support in the past year produces a constant crowding in effect on the level of private donations the paper finally illustrates how federal and state support have a crowding in effect at all levels while local support has a similar impact to total public support

impure altruism in dictators giving abstract we design an experiment to test whether incomplete crowding out in dictator games can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic preferences by giving the recipients an endowment of varying levels we create an environment in which crowding out may occur we find that the behavior of 66 of the dictators can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic utility function

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

agricultural water management and poverty in ethiopia the main focus of this article is to explore whether access to selected agricultural water management awm technologies has led to significant reduction in poverty and if they did so to identify which technologies had higher impacts in measuring impact we estimated the average treatment effect for the treated on crop income and measured the differences in consumption expenditures per adult equivalent of those with access and without access using matched data the estimated average treatment effect was significant and amounted to usd 82 per season moreover there was 24 less poverty incidence among users of awm technologies compared to nonusers all technologies were found to have significant poverty reducing impacts with micro dams deep wells river diversions and ponds leading to 37 26 11 and 9 reduction in poverty incidence compared to rainfed system finally our study identified the most important correlates of poverty on the basis this we made the policy recommendations to build assets awm technologies livestock etc to enhance human resource development and improve the functioning of labor markets for enhanced impact of awm technologies on poverty

the impact of conditional cash transfers on consumption and investment in nicaragua abstract this article examines the impact of a nicaraguan conditional cash transfer programme on measures of expenditures and productive investment despite clear evidence from a randomised evaluation that the programme increased current expenditures there is little evidence that it increased agricultural or non agricultural investment an estimated marginal propensity to consume out of the transfers of nearly one combined with no effect of cumulative past transfers on current consumption corroborate the direct evidence on investment in contrast to gains made in human capital investment the potential for long term increases in consumption as a result of other forms of increased investment may be limited

agency costs in environmental not for profits we examine the behavior of not for profits using utility maximization this leads to testable hypotheses regarding the costs of agency associated with the activities of not for profits our tests are similar to those previously employed regarding not for profit objectives but our interpretation is different our empirical test uses data on environmental groups unlike previous studies biased toward a finding of service maximization we account for endogenous explanatory variables a weak statement of our results is that managers of environmental groups derive positive marginal utility from expenditures for purposes other than providing services there may also be empirical support for a stronger conclusion