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

美国有140万个免税慈善组织。这些组织可以采用多种法律结构，但主要由公共慈善机构和私人基金会组成。许多这样的组织资助学术研究。尽管这些组织数量众多，但人们对它们如何资助研究以及这些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筹资策略上可以互换使用的术语。此外，第三方机构倾向于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，并评估其管理费用水平、透明度和财务可持续性等一般属性。因此，组织之间不容易进行跨领域比较，也无法评估其慈善方式和影响。本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策略对其进行分类。这将使慈善组织能够根据其组织方式和捐赠方式与同行进行分析。本项目建立了一个理论模型，通过基于慈善组织的法律结构和慈善策略的双向分类系统来促进我们对慈善组织的理解。该模型首先根据收入来源（捐赠或捐赠）对慈善组织进行划分，然后根据战略（使命或广泛关注）将其划分为四类，以捕捉其运营情况。然后，该模型通过美国国税局990表格的数据进行审查，该样本来自大约500个具有地理代表性和结构多样性的慈善组织。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随组织的特征和捐赠行为而变化。运用多项逻辑模型，对慈善组织的一系列组织特征和捐赠行为进行四类回归，分析哪些属性与一个分类类别相关联。来自这些组织的慈善家将接受采访，以评估该分类方案是否符合他们的愿景和对其使命和目的的理解。访谈数据将用于审查分类模型，以评估组织是否通过自己的解释进行了适当的分类，并了解这如何影响他们做出的决策。这个项目提高了我们对慈善组织的认识，并开始测试这些策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.