Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Private Provision of Public Goods, Classifying American Philanthropy

美国有140万个免税慈善组织。这些组织可以采取多种法律结构，但主要由公共慈善机构和私人基金会组成。其中许多组织为学术研究提供资金。尽管这些组织的数量很多，但人们对这些组织如何为研究提供资金以及这项研究是否有助于公共利益知之甚少。缺乏知识的部分原因是缺乏分类。非营利组织、基金会和协会是慈善组织在法律结构和资助策略中可互换使用的术语。此外，第三方机构有一种趋势，即根据慈善组织的重点领域(如教育、卫生或社区发展)对其进行分组，并评估其一般属性，如管理费用水平、透明度和财务可持续性。因此，不能轻易地比较不同领域的组织，也不能评估它们在慈善事业和影响方面的做法。该项目创建了一个分类方案，根据慈善组织的法律结构和慈善战略对其进行分类。这将允许根据慈善组织的组织方式和捐赠方式与同行一起分析慈善组织。这个项目开发了一个理论模型，以促进我们对慈善组织的理解，使用基于其法律结构和慈善战略的双向分类系统。该模型首先按收入来源--捐赠或捐赠--对慈善组织进行划分，然后按战略--使命或广泛关注--创建四个类别来记录他们的业务。然后用美国国税局表格990中的数据对该模型进行审查，样本约为500个在地理上具有代表性和结构多样化的慈善组织。分析的第一部分将样本中的每个组织分配到分类方案中的一个类别。分析的第二部分考察了这些类别如何根据组织的特征和捐赠行为而变化。利用多项Logit模型，对慈善组织的一系列组织特征和捐赠行为进行回归，分析哪些属性与一个分类类别有关联。来自这些组织的慈善家将接受采访，以评估这种分类方案是否符合他们的愿景以及对他们的使命和宗旨的理解。访谈数据将被用来审查分类模型，评估组织是否根据自己的解释进行了适当的分类，并了解这如何影响它们做出的决定。这个项目增进了我们对慈善组织的了解，并开始测试这些战略如何影响公共利益。

There are 1.4 million tax-exempt charitable organizations in the United States. These organizations can take multiple legal structures but primarily consist of public charities and private foundations. Many of these organizations fund academic research. Despite their number, relatively little is known about how these organizations fund research and if this research contributes to the public good. The lack of knowledge is caused in part from a lack of classification. Nonprofit, foundation, and association are terms used interchangeably by charitable organizations across legal structure and funding strategy. Further, there is a tendency by third-party agencies to group charitable organizations by their focus area, such as education, health, or community development, and evaluate general attributes like their level of administrative expenses, transparency, and financial sustainability. Thus, organizations cannot easily be compared across fields nor can their approach to philanthropy and impact be evaluated. This project creates a classification scheme to categorize charitable organizations based on their legal structure and philanthropic strategy. This will allow charitable organizations to be analyzed with their peers based on how they are organized and how they give. This project develops a theoretical model to advance our understanding of charitable organizations using a two-way system of classification based on their legal structure and their philanthropic strategy. The model divides charitable organization first by revenue source -- endowment or donation -- and then by strategy --mission or broadly focused -- creating four categories to capture their operations. The model is then vetted with data from the IRS Form 990 for a sample of approximately 500 charitable organizations that is geographically representative and structurally diverse. The first part of the analysis assigns each organization in the sample to a category from the classification scheme. The second part of the analysis examines how the categories vary by organization's characteristics and giving behavior. Using a multinomial logit model, the four categories are regressed on a series of organizational characteristics and giving behavior of the charitable organizations to analyze what attributes are linked to a classification category. Philanthropists from a set of these organizations will be interviewed to assess if this classification scheme fits within their vision and understanding of their mission and purpose. The interview data will be used to vet the classification model to assess if organizations have been properly categorized by their own interpretations and to understand how that affects the decisions they make. This project advances our knowledge of philanthropic organizations and begins to test how these strategies impact the public good.