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Eliminating or reducing the federal charitable deduction can have serious impacts on the level of charitable donations. Tax price elasticity estimates from a multivariate sample selection model indicate that changing the deduction to a 12% tax credit would have reduced individual donations in 2012 by 18.9% if applied to itemizing taxpayers and by 10.5% if extended to nonitemizers. Elimination of the deduction would have led to a 35% reduction in individual charitable donations. Even if coupled with cuts in marginal tax rates, eliminating the charitable deduction will still likely result in substantial reductions given the inelastic income elasticities of charitable donations. The estimates justify the ardent opposition of many in the nonprofit sector to the more radical proposals for changing the tax treatment of charitable contributions. (JEL D34, C34), I. INTRODUCTION The empirical literature on charitable donations is comprised largely of studies that examine total giving (e.g., Andreoni, Gale, and Scholz 1996; Bakija and Heims 2011; Brown and Lankford [...]

This paper hypothesizes that if day-ahead markets for electricity are efficient, then the day-ahead prices will reflect the processed information and expectations of all market participants regarding the next day's electricity load and thus the prices may be useful in actually predicting the next day's load. We test this hypothesis using data for the PG&E aggregation area in the California ISO. The results provide evidence of a positive and significant relationship between the hourly day-ahead electricity price (relative to the natural gas price) and the subsequent actual hourly load. The reported relationship is sufficiently robust to produce a forecast based on the day-ahead hourly price relative to the price of natural gas, some binary variables, and a number of estimated ARMA disturbances that is considerably more accurate than the ISO's day-ahead forecast. Keywords: Electricity markets, Electricity prices, Market efficiency, Load forecasting, Smart grid, California ISO, 1. INTRODUCTION To neoclassical economists, market prices are the primary signals ensuring efficient resource allocation. While many might concede that markets 'work' in the abstract, events like the California power [...]

The extent to which future United States demand for natural gas is satisfied by imports of LNG is contingent on the adequacy and cost competitiveness of North American supplies. One of the cheaper and more important sources of natural gas supply is accounted for by reserve appreciation, i.e., reserve growth, in known fields. Based on an extensively applied methodology developed by Arrington (1960), the increase in proved ultimate recovery is presumed to increase at a diminishing rate with the age of the field. In this paper, a single equation model of natural gas reserve growth in the Gulf of Mexico is developed and estimated. The results strongly suggest that the annual growth rate in the reserves of a field is significantly affected by initial discovery size, price, water depth, and unobserved field-specific effects. Hence, estimating oil and gas reserve growth using an Arrington based approach may underestimate the response of reserve growth to changes in economic fundamentals., 1. INTRODUCTION The extent to which future domestic demand for natural gas is satisfied by imports of LNG is contingent on the adequacy and cost competitiveness of North American supplies. [...]

The success rate of the US onshore oil and gas industry is examined with respect to technology and exploration success.

Empirical research to date has provided some evidence on factors important to the determination of religious giving as well as to cross denominational differences in religious giving patterns. For example, regression based models of religious giving, typically utilizing data on congregations and congregational contributions, lend considerable support to the observation that Catholics contribute less in amount and as a share of income than do Protestants. A number of possible explanations for this difference can be offered. Two often cited reasons are: (1) a lower estimated marginal propensity to give out of income for Catholics than for Protestants and (2) the more formalized structure of the giving process found in Protestant denominations. Here data on religious giving by individuals of different denominations is used to estimate a single equation econometric model using (a) the least squares and (b) the Tobit techniques. The least squares results corroborate past findings regarding differences in the religious giving of Catholics and Protestants. Unlike past results, however, the Tobit results reported suggest that though income is a statistically significant factor in the religious giving for both groups and the marginal impacts are actually higher for Catholics than for Protestants.

This paper examines the impact of U.S. military and non-military assistance on the allocation of public and private sector spending for eight major recipients over the 1972-1987 period. The model assumes that an aid recipient's effective post-assistance budget constraint is a priori unknown and must be estimated. Two versions of the model are tested. In version (A), the data is converted into real U.S. dollars using official exchange rates; in version (B), the data is converted using purchasing power parity exchange rates provided by Summers and Heston (1991). Major findings are the same for both versions. U.S. aid is highly fungible with a significant portion channeled to the private sector where it finances current consumption relatively more than investment.

Summary. -- Development assistance continues to be an important source of funds to developing nations. Donor countries prefer to provide categorical (or project) aid since it is believed that the tyiing of aid to a specific project will help to ensure that the funds are used in accordance with the designated objectives. Development literature indicates, however, that the ability to tie aid may be illusory. Specifically, recipient nations can cut the ties associated with categorical aid and effectively transform it into purely income-augmenting funds, i.e., purely fungible resources. The funds legally designated for specific development purposes may finance projects whose purposes are not in line with the developmental objective. The fungibility of development assistance has received little empirical attention. This paper is an effort to fill that gap. We formulate an econometric model that explains the response of Pakistan's spending for defense, public nondefense, and private consumption to US assistance within the 'fungibility' framework. Our reuslts suggest that US assistance to Pakistan, whether military or nonmilitary, is fully transformed into fungible resources with an impact on public spending less signfiicant than expected.

Ernest M. Zampelli [*] Over the last 20 years, the offshore exploratory success rate has more than doubled for a group of large producers which includes Exxon, Shell, Mobil, and [...]

This paper investigates whether compensation committees actively intervene to adjust accounting performance-based incentive schemes for the real, or perceived, reduced earnings credibility signalled by the purchase of non-audit services. Using a nonlinear, two-stage least-squares method that accounts for the simultaneity of executive pay, firm performance and non-audit fees, we find a significant negative relationship between non-audit fees and the sensitivity of chief executive officer (CEO) pay to firm performance. Point estimates suggest that the reduced weight applied to accounting performance lowers the incentive component of executive pay between roughly 5 and 8 per cent for the CEO of the ‘average firm’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]