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This study examines how an increase in home value affects fertility decisions of homeowners in China by exploiting regional heterogeneity in housing markets driven by local regulatory and geographic land constraints. In sharp contrast to the literature on developed countries, our instrumental variable results show a negative fertility response to house value growth driven by the recent housing boom in China, where a 100,000-yuan increase in lagged home values—about 43% of the average housing wealth at baseline—results in a 14% decrease in the likelihood of home-owning women giving birth. Further evidence suggests that underdeveloped credit markets may suppress the positive wealth effect of house value growth on childbearing.

In the quest to reduce global under- and malnutrition, which are particularly high among smallholder farmers, agriculture-nutrition linkages are receiving increasing attention. Researchers have analyzed the link between the quantity and diversity of food that farmers produce and nutritional outcomes but paid limited attention to a third agriculture-nutrition link: the link between how food is produced and nutritional outcomes. This neglect persists despite the majority of smallholder farmers relying on hand tools for farming, which implies heavy physical work and, thus, high energy requirements. To address this research gap, this study compares the energy requirements of farm households in rural Zambia that are characterized by three different levels of mechanization: hand tools, animal drought power, and tractors. 1638 days of detailed time-use and nutrition data were collected from 186 male and female adults and boys and girls during different seasons (land preparation, weeding, and harvesting/processing) using an innovative picture-based smartphone app called “Timetracker”. This data served to calculate different proxies for physical activity and energy requirements using “Ainsworth’s Compendium of Physical Activities”. The results suggest that detailed time-use data offers great potentials to study physical activity and energy requirements. The findings show strong linkages between farm technologies, physical activity levels, and energy requirements, suggesting that this agriculture-nutrition link deserves more scientific and political attention to reduce under- and malnutrition among smallholder farmers.

This research uses data from the 2018 National Financial Capability Study to investigate the attributes of households that engage in higher levels of family financial planning. Greater levels of financial planning are evidenced when households report more positive responses in planning for retirement, saving for emergencies, and establishing a will. Based on an ordinal logistic regression, various demographic attributes, objective and subjective financial knowledge scores, frequency of participation in financial education, and the frequent use of financial websites or apps to help with financial tasks are positively related to higher levels of family financial planning. The results have implications for financial literacy education and the development and marketing of websites and apps for personal finance.

Cross-border philanthropy occurs across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Seemingly domestic actors become players in international spheres, shattering the idea of a domestic/international dichotomy with clear lines delineating these spaces. This line blurring obscures monetary flows and highlights questions regarding nonprofit accountability in a transnational context. We present a study tracking money from US INGOs to Israeli NGOs, demonstrating the advantages and challenges to a big data approach and highlighting the importance of local partners.

An increasing number of nonprofits have shifted their microfinance operation to a for-profit format. Little has been explored on how these for-profits are being legitimized. This paper draws on the legitimacy theory to explore how nonprofits use substantive actions to seek legitimacy within the community to commercialize microfinance operations. Findings from case studies on two Indian microfinance organizations reveal that these organizations use three sets of substantive actions focusing on performance, legal suitability, and community participation. Implications include the use of substantive actions by SEs to balance the dual purpose and to ensure downward accountability toward the community. This study extends our understanding of efforts undertaken by social enterprises to seek legitimacy with the community as the evaluator. The identification of substantial actions offers tools for managers to incorporate commercial processes within nonprofits.

Many volunteer organizations offer short-term international voluntary service (IVS) opportunities as an avenue for participants to provide aid and humanitarian relief in international communities. This study empirically examines four potential antecedents of IVS performance among short-term IVS participants in developing countries: IVS participants’ intention to serve in similar IVS roles in the future, whether their IVS is at their preferred geographic location, IVS participants’ prior experience in the host country, and their performance in the sending organization’s trainings prior to the IVS. Utilizing both analyses of variance and OLS regression analysis of 147 IVS participants across 18 developing countries, we find evidence that short-term IVS performance is positively associated with future intentions to participate in IVS, previously having visited the host country, and performance during pre-travel trainings. Further, we analyze 158 blog posts written by 19 sample IVS participants, which provides a unique ‘inside look’ into the relationship between host country language skills and IVS performance.

Given the detrimental impact of natural resource degradation on livelihoods and sustainability, this research critically reviews the related studies and the role of policies and community participation toward addressing the issues. It carries out bibliometric analysis of highly cited scientific research publications on natural resource management compiled from the database of Scopus and Web of Science. Here, emphasis is given on reviewing the intersections between natural resource management and the underlying challenges in policies and community participation. In addition, it also analyzes the synergies of policies and institutions with decentralization of power for resource conservation and management. The article proposes a bottom-up approach to policy making and decentralized framework based on community participation and ownership rights for resource management. Engagement with local community and bringing in their behavioral changes would be crucial for efficient integrated natural resource management.

Migrant transgender individuals are at an increased risk of becoming victims of human trafficking and yet are under-represented in research and policy on human trafficking. In the United States (US), they may often be seen in hospital emergency rooms but are frequently mis-gendered and discriminated against. This article discusses the issue of human trafficking of migrant transgender women through the lens of a case example and advocates for the use of trauma-informed care in US-based agencies serving this population. The composite case of Esperanza illustrates the implementation of human rights principles, ethical treatment, and trauma-informed care with a transgender survivor of human trafficking in US-based agencies. The ethics of care are discussed with an emphasis on the core social work principles of service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. Autonomy and beneficence are also integral to the ethical approach of provision for trauma-informed and culturally responsive care of migrant transgender women who are survivors of human trafficking.

The current study aimed to understand why child stunting and anemia (CS&A) rates declined in Ghana between 2009 and 2018, and which priority policies and programs will further improve nutrition outcomes. Trends and potential drivers of stunting (height-for-age z-score

Two radically different descriptions of immigrant earnings trajectories in the USA have emerged. One asserts that immigrant men, following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, have low initial earnings and high earnings growth. Another asserts that the post-1965 immigrants have low initial earnings and low earnings growth. We describe the methodological issues that create this divide and show that low earnings growth becomes high earnings growth when immigrants are followed from their initial years in the USA; earnings growth is allowed to vary with entry earnings; and—when following cohorts instead of individuals—sample restrictions commonly used by labor economists are avoided.

This study examines if households experience utility gains by selecting one of its members to specialize in its financial management. Utilizing data that are collected from the Health and Retirement Study, a variable measuring households’ level of financial specialization (HFS) is first constructed. The HFS variable is examined for its association with household utility, measured in this study as financial satisfaction, income satisfaction, and life satisfaction. The evidence provided strongly indicates that a household that selects one of its members to specialize in its financial management experiences utility gains.

In 2013, Illinois enacted a new law (SB 957) to allow undocumented motorists to acquire Temporary Visitor Driver's Licenses (TVDLs). We explored the impact of this legislation on organ donor registration in the state. Using Freedom of Information Act requests, we obtained the Illinois TVDL and general adult driver's license applicant organ donation statistics for the last 3 years from the Illinois Secretary of State. We found that between 2017 and 2019, TVDLs directly resulted in 91,720 newly registered organ donors. This group registered as organ donors at rates significantly higher (p < 0.0001) than the general population. In the 3 years studied, only 7.3% of general driver's license registrants became new organ donor registrants, while TVDL drivers signed up at an average rate of 44.9%. TVDLs resulted in a significant increase in registered organ donors. Similar policies implemented nationwide could increase donor registrations substantially. In addition, this finding among a population largely of Latin American origin may suggest strategies for future organ donor registration efforts globally.

The paper examines the spending pattern of Indian states on human priority sectors (HPS) during 2001–2019 particularly stressing on its responsiveness towards the Development Goals and Population Demography. The observed expenditure pattern reveals that among all the major Indian States, Bihar is the most vulnerable state having the lowest spending and lowest growth rate of expenditures. We also find Water Sanitation and Family Welfare to be the most neglected subsectors of HPS as these sectors received only 3% of HPS expenditure on an average. Besides, the pattern also exposes the huge inter– state disparities in HPS expenditure, which is detected to be highest as regard Nutrition and has a rising trend for the Family Welfare component. Moreover, in response to Millennium Development Goals we find there was no significant change in spending pattern, however, we find mixed bearing of population demography on the HPS. For instance, states with a large base of rural population are observed to spend more on the priority sector, but contrary to the expectation, the size of the poor population has no bearing on the states’ allocation of resources. The findings of the paper are particularly significant for policy prescriptions to attain the Sustainable Development Goals as it offers sufficient evidence of negligence of timely spending on the HPS in response to the development goals and population composition. So, we find there is a need for introspection on HPS spending and its concurrent evaluation in terms of its allocation criterion and timing of allocation.

Policymakers are generally most concerned about improving the lives of the worst-off members of society. Identifying these people can be challenging. We take various measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) as indicators of the how well people are doing in life and employ Latent Class Analysis to identify those with greatest propensity to be among the worst-off in a nationally representative sample of over 215,000 people in the United Kingdom. Our results have important implications for how best to analyse data on SWB and who to target when looking to improve the lives of those with the lowest SWB (The authors owe a massive debt of gratitude to the Office for National Statistics for their support throughout this research. We are particularly grateful to Dawn Snape and Eleanor Rees for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, to Salah Mehad for the thorough review of methodology, and to Vahe Nafilyan for advice on clustering analysis. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for the very helpful comments. Thank you all very much.).

This policy brief reviews recent rulings on public accommodations access for transgender and gender-variant students in the school system as well as pending debates within the Supreme Court of the United States. This article opens with a review of current and past policies related to LGBTQ and transgender and gender-expansive adults and youth and the implications of these policies. A discussion related to the protection of the civil and human rights of LGBTQ youth and current advocacy needs follows, with a focus on understanding current educational and mental health issues of queer youth, particularly those who identify as transgender and gender-expansive and the consequences when the basic human and civil rights of this population are not protected. For inclusive and affirmative practice with LGBTQ adults and youth, it is an ethical necessity to understand the trajectory of civil rights and advocate for appropriate policies that will provide the supportive environment required to reduce mental health risks. Implications for practice, future policy development, and advocacy are suggested with a focus on informing and empowering social workers working with gender-variant youth, particularly within the school system.

Drawing on Annette Lareau’s conceptual framework of concerted cultivation versus accomplishment of natural growth this qualitative study examines the impact of parental practices on children’s exposure to financial topics and offers insight into how parents socialize their children on financial matters. Lareau’s model suggests that middle- and upper-class families tend to provide more opportunities for their children to socialize with institutions than working class families, thus, better preparing children to navigate, interact, and thrive in complex social systems as adults. Though the study’s findings don’t precisely align with Lareau’s theory, they suggest that mothers’ education level plays a role in financial socialization of children.

Although social work has long expressed support for human rights principles, scholarship in this area suggests that many social workers still struggle to apply human rights principles to practice. This paper aims to help address this gap by illustrating how a common human rights principle, the right to be free from discrimination, can be applied to a popular risk assessment tool used by social workers in the child welfare system in Ontario, Canada. This paper draws on case examples and knowledge from the field of law to highlight how this risk assessment instrument may increase the tendency of social workers to violate this right. It then offers suggestions about how social workers can modify their practice to better comply with their human rights obligations.

The human rights of immigrants and asylum seekers are threatened by the erosion of asylum and a system of crimmigration that combines immigration and criminal law. This paper explores social work practice with immigrants and asylum seekers in a legal service organization. A qualitative research study asked social workers, lawyers, and administrators (n = 27) to discuss the relationship between human rights and social work. Data from key informants were collected in five focus groups and one individual interview. Findings indicate that the participants see social work practice as an important response to the attack on immigrant and asylum seekers’ rights. Social workers identified human rights as a primary motivation for their practice, and integral to the profession. The findings also reveal that this legal service organization applies a rights-based approach by integrating social and legal services. Participants described how this rights-based approach protects and promotes the human rights of immigrants and asylum seekers. This paper illustrates the value of rights-based approaches and how they can be incorporated into social work practice.

Growing social, political, and economic uncertainties have shown that organizational resilience is becoming increasingly important for nonprofit organizations (NPOs). To ensure their long-term survival, NPOs need to respond to extreme events and adapt their services and processes. The theoretical premise of resource dependence theory assumes that interactions between an organization and its environment are crucial for the long-term adaptation to adversities. The present study investigates the contributions of nonprofit–private collaborations to organizational resilience of NPOs in light of the refugee crisis in Germany in 2015. Findings from a multiple holistic case study design indicate that collaborations of nonprofits with for-profit organizations support NPOs with stability, resources, expertise, and compassion to overcome resource-based, conceptual, and emotional challenges.

Victims of high-risk domestic violence in Malaysia return to their husbands if they lack the necessary support to face life challenges, especially after separation. Violence against women is part of the violation of human rights. Therefore, several action strategies are essential to counteract the various pressures of the social injustice they have endured. This qualitative study identifies how victims of domestic violence use coping strategies to face various challenges and pressures after deciding to break up with their spouse. In-depth interviews using purposive sampling and snowball techniques were conducted on 15 female respondents in Penang, Malaysia. Actions including filling in time, positive thinking, seeking formal services assistance, religious approaches, and sharing problems with informal systems successfully reduced the stress and concerns of victims of domestic violence. Enhancing and empowering domestic violence victims about their rights is vital for them to exit the abusive cycle. It is hoped that by understanding their rights as a person, they will be able to resort to better social support systems to overcome their current challenges to better social functioning. Hence, social workers must continuously provide the source of support, including empowering/allowing victims to continuously aware of their rights, which are the most fundamental elements of professional social work practice.

Although stated-preference surveys take various forms, the use of either text or visuals to represent attributes is uncontroversial and remain commonly used. While prior research has investigated the impact of these formats in other disciplines, little is known about their effects in terms of relative importance in environmental economics. We conduct surveys on households’ preferences for water efficient technologies in South Africa, where we compare three presentation formats, namely text, visuals, and both text and visuals. Survey data collected from 894 households in the Gauteng Province are analysed using the mixed-logit model to test whether these three formats generate differences in estimated utilities and marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP). This research sheds light on how to develop a valid presentation method for attribute levels in choice experiments, which is critical considering most environmental economics goods and services are not traded in the market. Our results obtained from the various presentation methods differ. There were also differences in MWTP estimates between the three groups. This suggests that the presentation format has significant impacts on choice. Thus, more research on presentation formats in environmental economics is warranted.

Assuming that consumption goods are differentiated in terms of environmental friendliness in a mixed duopolistic market, we present an analysis of public firm privatization effects on the environment and social welfare. The public firm maximizes the weighted average of its profit and social welfare. The private firm maximizes its profit. Consumers are aware of the environmental friendliness of goods. We demonstrate that an increase in the degree of public firm privatization lowers its environmental R&D investment and output. The decreased public firm’s R&D in turn lowers the private firm’s R&D investment through spillovers. The reduction of R&D investment by both firms decreases the environmental friendliness of these goods. Consumers consequently decrease their consumption of these goods. Therefore, if consumers exhibit environmental friendliness, then an increased degree of privatization might be socially undesirable.

We build a political competition model to analyze the welfare effect of campaign finance policies in a context where parties spend campaign contributions on mobilizing voters—rather than on advertising, as is usually done in this literature. This modification results in key consequences for the welfare evaluation of campaign finance policies. Additionally, we measure the social cost of contributions in terms of the quality lost on public works delivered by contributors. We find that subsidizing campaigns with public funds and simultaneously banning contributions is welfare-improving for citizens only if the parties’ mobilization technology is not especially productive. Combining non-matching subsidies with limits on contributions is Pareto improving under same technological conditions. Imposing a contribution lump-sum tax, while simultaneously investing these revenues on public projects is welfare-improving for citizens, and combining this policy with a limit on contributions is Pareto improving. These tax results hold regardless of parties’ mobilization productivity level.

As gender relations have spatial implications, girls’ and women’s daily activities are overshadowed by social, economic, and physical risks that limit their access to the public sphere and hence to opportunities. However, the lack of comparable and representative data still restricts the analysis of women’s and girls’ lived realities. This study utilizes a two-pronged qualitative methodological approach: 48 in-depth-interviews to understand how spaces become gendered, how they shape social norms, and what impact this process has on the mobility of different youth segments by sex, education, age, and employment status, and 12 participatory community mapping exercises to understand how young women and men use and perceive public space differently. The study demonstrates how sexual and gender-based violence render public spaces, in two slum areas of Greater Cairo, inaccessible to women and girls. Significantly different patterns of access to public spaces among males and females are recorded. Males cover far more ground than females in both areas of study and have access to more destinations, such as entertainment and sports facilities, whereas women constantly needed to legitimize their occupation of public spaces based on traditional gender roles. Additionally, the coping mechanisms that girls and women adopt to mitigate the constant threat of sexual violence further gender the public space by mainstreaming the notion that sexual violence is a normal part of any girl or woman’s experience of public space—forcing women to retreat further.

In this paper, we examine the changing landscape of migration policy work conducted by civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Czech Republic. We focus on how funding opportunities affect CSOs’ policy work, long-term planning and everyday practices. Through a qualitative analysis of 15 interviews with representatives of non-governmental organisations and 11 interviews with policy stakeholders, we explored the critical and reflexive strategies adopted by CSOs. A crucial role in developing critical capacity seems to stem from umbrella organisations—organisations whose members are organisations. With respect to CSOs’ strong dependency on the state, umbrella organisations might serve as shields protecting individual organisations from direct conflicts with governmental policies and institutions. In the end, we assume that meta-organisations potentially function as important vehicles for the reflexive development and evolution of organisations and decrease transaction costs for the organisation field.

Bernard Lonergan maintained that economies are goods of order which, when properly disposed, make possible the regular provision of the material conditions for the fuller flourishing human. Lonergan’s economic thought tried to understand the economy related to a society’s civic institutions, political orders, and cultural traditions. In addition, he wished to explain the normative rhythms of economic development and the conditions of its dynamic equilibrium. In this sense, Lonergan’s analysis presents an alternative to conventional accounts of the kind of economic progress the Basque Country has enjoyed in recent decades, in ways that still resonate with the Basque Country’s emphasis on the centrality of the productive process and the values of its people.

This article presents a new strategy for reviewing large, multidisciplinary academic literatures: a multi-method comprehensive review (MCR). We present this approach and demonstrate its use by the NGO Knowledge Collective, which aims to aggregate knowledge on NGOs in international development. We explain the process by which scholars can identify, analyze, and synthesize a population of hundreds or thousands of articles. MCRs facilitate cross-disciplinary synthesis, systematically identify gaps in a literature, and can create data for further scholarly use. The main drawback is the significant resources needed to manage the volume of text to review, although such obstacles may be mitigated through advances in “big data” methodologies over time.

Many sources indicate that smallholder tree-crop commodity farmers are poor, but there is a paucity of data on how many of them are poor and the depth of poverty. The living income concept establishes the net annual income required for a household in a place to afford a decent standard of living. Based on datasets on smallholder cocoa and tea farmers in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Kenya and literature, we conclude that a large proportion of such farmers do not have the potential to earn a living income based on their current situation. Because these farmers typically cultivate small farm sizes and have low capacity to invest and to diversify, there are no silver bullets to move them out of poverty. We present an assessment approach that results in insights into which interventions can be effective in improving the livelihoods of different types of farmers. While it is morally imperative that all households living in poverty are supported to earn a living income, the assessment approach and literature indicate that focussing on short- to medium-term interventions for households with a low likelihood of generating a living income could be: improving food security and health, finding off-farm and alternative employment, and social assistance programmes. In the long term, land governance policies could address land fragmentation and secure rights. Achieving living incomes based on smallholder commodity production requires more discussion and engagement with farmers and their household members and within their communities, coordination between all involved stakeholders, sharing lessons learnt and data.

Growing use of machine learning in policy and social impact settings have raised concerns for fairness implications, especially for racial minorities. These concerns have generated considerable interest among machine learning and artificial intelligence researchers, who have developed new methods and established theoretical bounds for improving fairness, focusing on the source data, regularization and model training, or post-hoc adjustments to model scores. However, little work has studied the practical trade-offs between fairness and accuracy in real-world settings to understand how these bounds and methods translate into policy choices and impact on society. Our empirical study fills this gap by investigating the impact of mitigating disparities on accuracy, focusing on the common context of using machine learning to inform benefit allocation in resource-constrained programs across education, mental health, criminal justice, and housing safety. Here we describe applied work in which we find fairness-accuracy trade-offs to be negligible in practice. In each setting studied, explicitly focusing on achieving equity and using our proposed post-hoc disparity mitigation methods, fairness was substantially improved without sacrificing accuracy. This observation was robust across policy contexts studied, scale of resources available for intervention, time, and relative size of the protected groups. These empirical results challenge a commonly held assumption that reducing disparities either requires accepting an appreciable drop in accuracy or the development of novel, complex methods, making reducing disparities in these applications more practical., 40 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, 7 supplementary figures, 4 supplementary tables; revised to improve clarity and discussion

Recent evidence suggests that individual differences in attachment may be differentially associated with relationship status among heterosexual adults. However, sexual minority individuals face unique challenges, such as minority stress, that can impact relationship development, and thus research is needed to investigate singlehood among sexual minority adults. A total of 1005 sexual minority adults participated in the current study (n = 481 long-term single; n = 524 partnered). Participants provided demographic information and completed measures of adult attachment and minority stress (internalized stigma, stigma consciousness, experiences of discrimination). Those who were single reported greater attachment anxiety and avoidance, and were higher in internalized stigma and stigma consciousness, compared to their partnered counterparts. In contrast, partnered individuals reported more experiences of discrimination. Finally, internalized stigma predicted long-term single status (single vs. partnered), over and above the effects of attachment insecurity. Results suggest that attachment and aspects of minority stress may be related to singlehood among some sexual minority adults. Social policy and professional practice implications are discussed, including the importance of increasing mental health practitioner awareness of the potential impacts of minority stress on both mental health and relationship issues.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the history of school-based policing, namely, the deployment of School Resource Officers (SROs), and examine the evidence of this program’s impacts on school safety and on students in the USA. We offer a review of the literature documenting the costs and effects of SROs in US schools. More than two decades of research have not yielded evidence that police enhance school safety, but it has repeatedly been documented that embedding police in schools results in serious harms to minoritized students, especially those who are Black, disabled, LGBTQ, or low income. This review of the research makes clear that SROs have not delivered school safety and have caused considerable harm to marginalized students. It must therefore be a priority of the new administration to end schools’ reliance on law enforcement to manage the students in their care and reinvest in the proven support that school-based social work affords to our youth.

Benevolent sexism takes a subjectively positive view of women in traditional gender roles, revering them as gentle, nurturing, and in need of protection by men. While studies show that people who express attitudes of benevolent sexism are willing to restrict women’s choices at an individual level, limited research exists on the impact of benevolent sexism in social policy. Using a single-case study method and benevolent sexism as a conceptual framework, I examined the introduction, passage, and legal defense of Texas House Bill 2 (TX HB2), a targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) law. HB2 was passed by the Texas legislature in 2013 and ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2016 case of Whole Woman’s Health et al. v. Hellerstedt. Primary source legislative and court documents were analyzed to explore whether and how benevolent sexism ideologies were reflected in the introduction, passage, and legal defense of HB2 as a TRAP law. Four themes emerged: The State has the Right to Protect Women, Women Need Protection from “Bad Players,” Women are Emotional, and Women are Mothers/Vessels. Results confirm that language consistent with benevolent sexism was used in the context of policy making to justify restricting women’s access to pre-viability abortion.

In a social dilemma, group members have equal access to collective resources, but each must decide between acting in self-interested or collectively interested ways when considering their contribution to the group. Our research focused on how the perceived fairness of contributions and outcomes affects these decisions. We report on an experiment that manipulated two factors related to fairness: dilemma-framing that emphasized either individual or collective gains, and whether the partner’s relative contribution was high, low, or equal to the subject’s. Also, subjects’ social value orientations—individualist vs. prosocial—were balanced across conditions. Subjects made two rounds of contribution decisions and received feedback on their outcomes after each. As hypothesized for first-round contributions, prosocials contributed more to public goods and framing had no discernable effect. In the second round, neither social value orientation nor framing influenced participants’ fairness evaluations when partners made a low initial contribution to the group, but dilemma-framing affected participants’ fairness evaluations when the partner made a high contribution to the group. Importantly, results generally supported key hypotheses for participants’ attempts to rectify injustices via subsequent contributions and bonus sharing. Partner’s contributions, social value orientation, and dilemma-framing all affected redistributive behaviors.

This paper used multi-country firm-level data covering 104 countries for the period from 2010 to 2019 to investigate the effects of bribery on credit access for firms holding bargaining power and/or facing market competition. We used firms’ size and legal status to capture their bargaining power, while the levels of market competition were analyzed according to the number of competitors in the same working field. Our empirical results provided evidence to support the “greasing-the-wheels-of-credit access” hypothesis. Furthermore, the effects of bribery become stronger for larger-sized or formally registered firms, and those facing no market competition. These effects also become pronounced if we controlled the endogeneity problem.

In this article we show the potential of using documents to answer research questions pertinent to nonprofit and voluntary sector studies. We start by introducing what the methodological literature has to say about how documents are employed as a data source, along with their strengths and weaknesses. Then, we review 178 articles in three main nonprofit journals to analyze how researchers have used documents to understand nonprofit and voluntary sector organizations. We also provide a case example of document analysis to reveal the processes involved in using documents as a source of evidence. We emphasize that situating documents in a field of action invites researchers to pay attention not only to the information they contain but also what their production and consumption reveal about organizational life. Finally, we conclude with the implications and considerations for using documents in nonprofit and voluntary sector research.

Globalization is accompanied by increasing current account imbalances. They can undermine the positive impacts of increasing international cooperation and trade on economic growth and income convergence. At the same time, climate change challenges the global community and requests for co-operative action. Regional energy transformation due to climate policies and the resulting regional mitigation costs are key variables of climate economic analysis. This study is the first that include current account imbalances and imperfect capital markets to investigate potential market feedback mechanisms between climate policies, energy sector transformation and capital markets. Furthermore, it answers the question whether the capital-intensive transformation towards zero-carbon economies increases the policy cost of mitigation under the condition of imperfect capital markets. First results demonstrate a dominant baseline effect of capital market imperfections on macroeconomic variables, and moderate effects on mitigation costs in global climate policy scenarios. For some regions (e.g. Middle East) estimates of relatively high mitigation costs are revised downwards, if imperfect capital markets are considered.

This research examined whether the putative effect of incarceration on income poverty over the life course differs by marital status among a sample of male high school graduates. The purpose was to better understand the effects of imprisonment on a study population with relatively stronger economic prospects who have not been the focus of prior studies on the topic. Data were drawn from the 1975, 1992, and 2004 waves of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to yield an analytic sample of 2678 male high school graduates. We then estimated discrete-time hazard models to investigate (1) whether incarceration is associated with marital dissolution among married men, (2) whether incarceration is associated with marriage among unmarried men, and whether the effect of incarceration on income poverty differs by marital status among an aggregated sample of both married and unmarried men. Event history analysis revealed that men who experienced incarceration before age 25 were significantly more likely to fall into income poverty relative to men who were never incarcerated. However, men who experienced incarceration after marriage were also significantly more likely to separate or divorce, and unmarried men who experienced incarceration were significantly less likely to marry in the first place. The results imply that marriage as a path towards avoiding economic hardship in old age is seldom available to returning prisoners. Thus, the findings reinforce policy efforts aimed at education, job skills, and training as well as comprehensive family case management programs for formerly incarcerated individuals, couples, and families.

The relationship between religious orientation and poverty has not been given adequate attention in the literature. The major objective of this study was to determine the effect of religious orientation on poverty status. We collected data from a representative sample of household heads in Ghana through a multi-stage random sampling. The data was analyzed using logistic and probit models. Instrumental variable estimation and structural equation modeling were used to address reverse causality and assess mediated effect, respectively. The study found that intrinsic religious orientation has a negative effect on poverty, particularly in urban areas. The study also found that the negative relationship between intrinsic religiosity orientation and poverty is partially mediated by the propensity to save. The basic implication of our finding is that personal religiosity/religious commitment needs to be complemented by church programs that take advantage of the rich and diversified religious network that exists in urban areas to facilitate poverty reduction.

This article examines ways of leveraging gender and outsider positionalities in a manner that benefits the research process in international third sector field research. International research is conducted by individuals collecting data outside their country of origin or long-term residence. In the article I reflect on the role of researcher outsider status as it intersects with gender, and how these positionalities can be used to positively influence data collection in the field. I argue that aspects of female outsider status often experienced as negative also can offer unexpected benefits to research fieldwork, such as access as an outsider to conflict-affected communities, additional assistance to the “vulnerable” female, extra explanation to the “naive” female researcher, and access facilitated by third gender or honorary male status assigned to female outsiders.

Ethical issues of ethnographic research are long-debated, but the context of volunteering and voluntary organisations emphasises challenges and opportunities associated with this method. In this paper, we explore these rarely examined concerns with focus on participant-observation, in terms of ‘voluntariness’ of participants, responsibilities of researchers in maintaining boundaries and self-care of researchers themselves in such contexts. Reflecting on implications in ethnographic enquiry from research design to conclusions, we argue volunteering should be viewed as an important context highlighting ethical issues often seen as ‘tick-box’ exercises or generally accepted research limitations. The increased risks to participants through access, sampling and questioning processes, to ethnographers through emotional involvement and to volunteer-involving organisations are discussed through reflection on three distinct pieces of research conducted between 2009 and 2019. These issues are ethical as well as methodological, as data yielded may be rich, demonstrating immersion in the ‘community’, but also limited in credibility.

This study examines housing affordability among female-headed households, focusing on the differences between those living in rural areas versus those in urban areas. Existing literature on female householders lacks a contemporary understanding of the demographic, housing, and financial characteristics and the differences among rural and urban householders. Using multinomial logistic regression and 2013 American Housing Survey data for the analyses, this study identified statistically significant differences regarding housing affordability among rural and urban householders. The results of this research provide insight concerning the attributes of female householders, particularly those that live in rural areas, and their relationship to housing affordability. Our findings reveal housing cost burden as one of the prevailing struggles for female householders in the rural and urban areas of the US. Rural female householders spent a smaller percentage of their income on housing on average compared to urban householders, yet about half of all rural female householders were cost burdened. Female householders with children experienced more housing hardship and worse economic conditions than those without children. Our research points to the need for policy interventions that mitigate female-headed households’ economic and housing challenges, particularly those in rural areas who may have difficulty accessing government programs and assistance.

This study challenges the argument that making it mandatory for the anti-corruption agencies to obtain prior supervisor approvals for detecting and prosecuting the corrupt can bring-in efficiency in corruption control. Applying the political economy concepts such as rents and rent seeking, this study explores the intricate relationships that exist between discretions available with the supervisors and their decisions of allowing the anti-corruption enforcement to detect and prosecute the public servants in corruption cases. The issue of similar facts getting differently appreciated by different public authorities has also been brought out by this study. This study argues that prior supervisor approvals in high discretionary and low risk environments can promote rent seeking behaviour in public organizations. Findings of this study show that limiting the discretions of authorities that decide supervisor approvals and holding them accountable for their decisions can be the conditions critical for efficient anti-corruption enforcement in India.

An extensive literature identifies conditions under which markets and states work efficiently and effectively toward their stated missions. When these conditions are violated, these institutions are deemed to show some level of failure. In contrast to the study of market and government failures, scholars have tended to focus on non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) successes instead of failures. This is probably because they view NGOs as virtuous actors, guided by principled beliefs rather than instrumental concerns, not susceptible to agency conflicts, accountable to the communities they serve, and working cooperatively with each other. A growing literature questions this “virtue narrative.” When virtue conditions are violated, NGOs could exhibit different levels of failure. In synthesizing this literature, we offer an analytic typology of NGO failures: agency failure, NGOization failure, representation failure, and cooperation failure. Finally, given NGOs’ important role in public policy, we outline institutional innovations to address these failures.

People with high socioeconomic status disproportionally affect energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions directly through their consumption and indirectly through their financial and social resources. However, few climate change mitigation initiatives have targeted this population segment, and the potential of such initiatives remains insufficiently researched. In this Perspective, we analyse key characteristics of high-socioeconomic-status people and explore five roles through which they have a disproportionate impact on energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions and potentially on climate change mitigation, namely as consumers, investors, role models, organizational participants and citizens. We examine what is known about their disproportionate impact via consumption and explore their potential influence on greenhouse gas emissions through all five roles. We suggest that future research should focus on strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by high-socioeconomic-status people and to align their investments, organizational choices and actions as social and political change agents with climate change mitigation goals. High-socioeconomic-status individuals have a disproportionate effect on greenhouse gas emissions as consumers and through four other key roles they play in society. This Perspective examines the effect and suggests how future research could seek to reduce the resulting energy and climate impact.

The study of nonprofit finance and financial management is growing in popularity. The numerical focus and availability of archival U.S. data have fueled the growth of the field; however, this availability has also influenced the research questions and methods utilized by researchers. Despite the dominance of large-scale quantitative analysis in the literature, there are a wide variety of research methods available in the field. Each approach has strengths and limitations that should be utilized to answer different research questions in different ways. We catalog these techniques and include recommendations on how and why to deliberately cultivate methodological pluralism in nonprofit finance and financial management research.

Voluntary and nonprofit sector studies are relatively young and still seeking common intellectual ground. One vehicle for accomplishing this task is the systematic literature review (SLR). SLRs approach knowledge generation through a rules-driven comprehensive process for finding and analyzing prior knowledge. SLRs support the voluntary sector’s current emphasis on data transparency in publication. They also support the growth of voluntary sector empiricism by offering a greater claim to reliability and generalizability of findings. Finally, they support goals of inclusiveness and knowledge unification that are important to the voluntary sector academy, its funders, and its constituents. This explanatory article draws on examples from the nonprofit and voluntary sector to describe the rationale and methods of the SLR.

Nonprofits operate in increasingly complex and turbulent environments. However, few studies have explored nonprofits’ resilience during natural disasters. This study uses Hurricane Katrina as a case study to explore whether nonprofits can regain their original financial performance after significant natural disasters and what organizational capacities and abilities influence their ability to bounce back. The results show that recovery is slow, taking between three and five years for half of the nonprofits in the sample. Recovery depends on factors such as organizational size, equity, surplus, and commercial revenue. This study enriches the nonprofit financial health literature and reveals that the factors associated with financial resilience are different from those that predict financial vulnerability.

We evaluated a poverty-reduction program that targeted ultra-poor women in rural Bangladesh to promote economic and social improvement through income-generating activities and strengthening socio-political awareness. We hypothesized that ultra-poor women participating in the program would have lower domestic violence and depressive symptoms and higher subjective well-being, household economic status, and food security than non-participants. A quasi-experimental design with program and comparison arms and assessments at two times (i.e., baseline and end-line) was used. Analysis of covariance with linear multilevel random-intercept models adjusted for available baseline variables was used to estimate program-comparison differences at end-line for economic status, perceived economy, food insecurity, domestic violence, depressive symptoms, and subjective well-being. We also estimated the benefits attributable to the program for subjective well-being, food insecurity, and domestic violence. Women in the program arm had greater subjective well-being with a decrease in negative affect of life by 33.5% and dissatisfaction with life by 42.5%. The women in the program arm encountered 12% or fewer incidences of domestic violence than did the women in the comparison arm. Food insecurity reduced by an average of 14% due to the program. This poverty-reduction program helped in improving women’s access to and control of resources and their social awareness, thus empowering them and promoting economic, social, and psychological well-being. Poverty-reduction programs that acknowledge and address the social complexity of extreme poverty have the potential to effectively reach the ultra-poor who otherwise are often missed by traditional microcredit programs.