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Browsing by Author "Wang, Xiaoyun"
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Item Building Civic Infrastructure Organizations: The Lilly Endowment's Experiment to Grow Community Foundations(2019-05) Wang, Xiaoyun; Benjamin, Lehn; Burlingame, Dwight; Guo, Chao; Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark; Steensland, BrianIn the past 50 years, we have seen significant public and philanthropic investment in building civil society in countries around the globe. This includes initiating community foundations to support the development of vibrant communities and civic life. Yet we have little knowledge about why some initiatives bear fruit and others fail to do so. More specifically, why some community foundations initiated by institutional funders are able to garner local giving necessary to sustain themselves and others are not. This dissertation contributes to our knowledge about such initiatives by researching the Lilly Endowment’s GIFT Initiative (Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow), a project providing incentives to start nearly 60 new community foundations and revive 17 existing community foundations in Indiana since 1990. I employed mixed methods and three sources of data: historical archives, statistics of community foundations’ financial information and community demographics, and case studies of four community foundations. First, I found two existing explanations offered in the literature did not account for the lack of local support for the community foundations I studied. More specifically, I found that high level of income and wealth does not necessarily lead to high level of giving to community foundations and the lack of community identity is not the primary reason explaining community foundations’ struggles in attracting local donations. Rather the study shows that social capital is crucial for garnering local giving through the mechanism of facilitating information sharing. Second, I examined the long-term effects of matching grants, a key strategy used by Lilly Endowment to leverage local giving. I found that long-term provision of matching grants might reduce organizations’ incentives to seek funding sources on their own. My dissertation lends further insight into the sustainability of civic infrastructure organizations, a popular institutional model for building local civil society even today.Item Charitable Bequest Giving in the USA(2014-07-10) Rooney, Patrick; Hayat, Amir; Kramarek, Michal; Wang, XiaoyunThe estate tax plays an important and controversial role in many aspects of our society. This paper focuses on one of the more important and more controversial aspects of the estate tax. Namely, we examine the relationships between changes in the estate tax rate and estate tax exemption levels and aggregate charitable bequest giving using time series data. During life, donors give for many reasons, which may or may not be affected by the tax deductibility (only about one-fourth of US households itemize their taxes, so for three-fourths, the price of giving a dollar is a dollar). Likewise, the decision to give at death is motivated by many factors, including the tax implications for some, but it must be recalled that less than two percent of Americans pay any estate tax, and less than half of them pay anything that would be considered a meaningful tax (Rooney and Tempel, 2001). That said, for very large estates, the exemption levels and the estate tax rates can be a considerable factor in estate planning.Item Dynamics of American Giving: Descriptive Evidence(Sage, 2021-08) Rooney, Patrick M.; Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark; Wang, Xiaoyun; Han, Xiao; Lilly Family School of PhilanthropyAlmost all of the scientific literature on charitable giving is implicitly based on a static paradigm which posits there are non-donors who never give and donors who habitually give year-in/year-out to a specific charitable purpose. This article presents evidence that charitable giving is not static, but dynamic: Few Americans never give, and among Americans that donate the majority are switchers—giving in some years but not others or switching from one charitable purpose to another. The implications are that a static perspective is misleading, and research questions should place more emphasis on the time dimension of charitable giving.Item Generational Succession in American Giving: Donors Down, Dollars Per Donor Holding Steady But Signs That It Is Starting to Slip(Sage, 2018-10) Rooney, Patrick M.; Wang, Xiaoyun; Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark; Lilly Family School of PhilanthropyComparing two generations at the same point in their life cycles, four decades apart, indicates that average giving to charitable organizations (not including congregations) by Baby Boom families has remained roughly in line with the level of giving done by the Greatest and Silent generations, but that average giving by GenX and Millennial families is lower. All three generations exhibit the confluence of two divergent trends: lower percentages who give large amounts, but among families who do give large amounts, levels of giving compared with donors in previous generations are similar if not higher. The two divergent trends also characterize giving to religious congregations. Although “dollars per donor holding steady or up” describes Millennial, GenX, and Baby Boom families compared with the Greatest and Silent generations, when the former three generations are compared with each other, there are some indications that average giving among donors is starting to slip.Item Spirituality: What Does it Mean and to Whom?(Wiley, 2018-09) Steensland, Brian; Wang, Xiaoyun; Chism Schmidt, Lauren; Sociology, School of Liberal ArtsWhile there is increasing interest in the topic of spirituality, scholars have limited data on its meaning among ordinary Americans. Based on an open‐ended question in a new nationally representative survey, this article documents the elements that make up people's views of spirituality. We find that theism is the dominant focus of American spirituality, with a relatively small percentage of people offering exclusively immanent descriptions. Cognitive and relational orientations are more prominent than behavioral or ethical orientations. Using latent class analysis, we identify seven distinctive views of spirituality that vary considerably in their prevalence and social profiles. Binary logit regression shows that spiritual self‐identification, belief in God, and worship attendance are the religious factors most strongly associated with views of spirituality. Among sociodemographic predictors, significant associations with gender, race, education, and income are limited or absent. In contrast, the influences of age and political ideology are more substantial.