Faith-based charity and crowd-out during the great depression

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gruber, Jonathan; Hungerman, Daniel M.
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Notre Dame
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2006.11.004
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 1043-1069
• 关键词: crowd-out; Charitable giving; religion; Great Depression

摘要

Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the New Deal. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the New Deal crowded-out church charitable spending in the 1930s. We do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large Christian denominations, matched to data on local New Deal spending. We instrument for New Deal spending using measures of the political strength of a state's congressional delegation, and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending. With both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity. Crowd-out was small as a share of total New Deal spending (3%), but large as a share of church spending: our estimates suggest that benevolent church spending fell by 30% in response to the New Deal, and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V.