In the days immediately after the September 11 attacks on the U.S., we witnessed the ability of a country, its citizens, and its friends to pitch in during the most difficult of times. We all continue to be moved by acts of extraordinary heroism in New York City and Washington, D.C., and now in Afghanistan, where soldiers are risking their lives to defend our freedoms. There have been other con...

Suggested contributions, membership categories, and discrete, incremental thank-you gifts are devices often used by benevolent associations that provide public goods. Such devices focus donations into discrete levels, thereby effectively limiting the donors’ freedom to give. We study the effects on overall donations of the tradeoff between rigid schemes that severely restrict the choices of con...

When firms give money to candidates for public office, what return can they expect on their investment? The answer may depend on the party in power, and whether it rewards longstanding contributors, pays back all donors on equal terms, or refuses to be swayed by corporate money. In this analysis of Brazil, we use a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of an electoral victory o...

BACKGROUND Population-based data on the rate and outcome of complications related to blood donation are sparse. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS Data from a survey conducted in 2003 in Aarhus County, Denmark, were used to assess the overall rate of donor complications. Additional nationwide data on moderate and severe donor complications were obtained from the Danish Register of Complications Related...

We test a self-signaling theory using two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments. Mobile phone users are randomly sampled to receive promotional offers for movie tickets via SMS technology. Test groups are exposed to different pre-determined levels of price discounts and charitable donations tied to the ticket purchase. The main effects of price discounts and charitable donations ...

In Europe, the dynamics of endemic hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection remain enigmatic. We studied the presence of silent HEV infection among Dutch blood donors. Using donations collected throughout the Netherlands in 2011 and 2012, 40,176 donations were tested for HEV RNA in 459 pools of 48 or 480 donations. Deconstruction of the reactive pools identified 13 viraemic donors. In addition, 5,239 ...

In this paper, we study shareholder views on corporate political contributions. We find that, with shareholders' explicit approval, firms are more likely to have higher contribution, measured by the amount of donations US parties in next election cycle. Firm's contributions also a positive long-run impact firm valuations. When analysing firm's ideology, weak evidence that Democratic party may b...

We model the determinants of donations made to UK overseas development charities using panel data on charities’ donation income covering a 25 year period. The paper starts by reviewing relevant theory and previous empirical work on donations to UK charities before outlining a framework in which donations are a function of fundraising, government grants, total household income, inequality in hou...

BACKGROUND Hepatitis E virus (HEV) Genotype 3 (G3) infection is a zoonosis that may be transmitted during the acute phase by transfusion. The aim of this study was to determine the incidence of HEV and seroprevalence among Irish blood donors. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS Anonymized samples from 1076 donations collected in 2012 were tested for HEV immunoglobulin (Ig)G using the Wantai enzyme-linke...