Nonprofit Financial Response to Immigration

Nonprofit organizations are important actors in local communities, providing services to vulnerable populations and acting as stewards for charitable contributions from other members of the population. An important question is whether nonprofits spend or receive additional revenues in response to changes in the populations they serve. Because immigrant populations both receive and contribute to nonprofit resources, changes in immigrant numbers should be reflected in changing financial behavior of local nonprofits. Using data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics and the American Community Survey, we study whether nonprofit financial transactions change in response to changes in the local immigration population, the nature of the change, and the degree to which these changes vary by nonprofit type. Findings suggest that nonprofit financial behavior changes with growth and decline in immigrant populations underscoring the importance of nonprofits as service providers and contribute to an understanding of how organizations respond to external forces.

Anti-corruption

Representing at least five percent of world GDP, corruption is a great challenge in general, and especially associated with sustainable business, both nationally and internationally. In this chapter, I reflect on how to address corruption and anti-corruption practices. Typical forms of corruption include bribery, facilitation payments, gifts, hospitality and expenses, political contributions, charitable contributions, sponsorships, voluntary community contributions, trading in influence, and conflict of interest and impartiality. Corruption leads to weak institutions and injustice, less respect for rights, denial of basic services, and several of the world’s environmental damage and tragedies are associated with corruption. Studies show that almost half of the companies have experienced fraud over the past two years. This chapter addresses the corruption challenges, how they are addressed by corporations and key international laws as well as challenges associated with norms and behaviors. How to detect and avoid corruption receives key attention. As anti-corruption is a huge topic and challenge, and only limited space is available in the book, the topic is presented from a more general perspective. Even though anti-corruption is often left out when talking about sustainability, it cannot be excluded from a book on sustainability and responsibility.

Community Views About Zakat on Cryptocurrencies

<p><em>The cryptocurrency industry has exploded, with an increasing number of individuals investing in digital assets — even Malaysians who adhere to Shariah financial norms. The surge in Islamic faith members' involvement in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has given birth to Zakat payments. Zakat is the third pillar of Islam, and it compels Muslims to make charitable contributions if they have sufficient means. The major considerations to explore are whether zakat is required on cryptocurrency investments and how the community sees zakat on cryptocurrencies. As a result, this paper will investigate the prospect of </em><em>cryptocurrencies as a digital assets</em><em> being a new source of revenue for zakat from an Islamic perspective by acquiring appropriate rulings (fatwas) and then investigating community attitudes on zakat on cryptocurrency.</em><em></em></p>

One and Done: The Long Eclipse of Women’s Televised Sports, 1989–2019

For 3 decades we have tracked and analyzed the quantity and quality of coverage of women’s and men’s sports in televised news and highlights shows. In this paper, we report on our most recent iteration of the longitudinal study, which now includes an examination of online sports newsletters and social media. The study reveals little change in the quantitative apportionment of coverage of women’s and men’s sports over the past 30 years. Men’s sports—especially the “Big Three” of basketball, football and baseball—still receive the lion’s share of the coverage, whether in-season or out of season. When a women’s sports story does appear, it is usually a case of “one and done,” a single women’s sports story obscured by a cluster of men’s stories that precede it, follow it, and are longer in length. Social media posts and online sports newsletters’ coverage, though a bit more diverse in some ways, mostly reflected these same patterned gender asymmetries. Gender-bland sexism continued as the dominant pattern in 2019 TV news and highlights’ stories on women’s sports. Three themes of this “gender-bland” coverage include: 1) nationalism, 2) asymmetrical gender marking coupled with local parochialism, and 3) community service/ charitable contributions.

Tax policy and charitable giving: an evaluation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2017 and its impact on charitable contributions

Studies of how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2017 will affect charitable giving narrowly focus on the increase in the standard deduction. Based on these studies, the media and policy analysts warned that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would lead to a sharp decrease in charitable giving. However, these predictions did not fully account for some of the nuances in the tax code and the political economy of changes to tax policy. We explain that a richer analysis includes the political response of interest groups. Tax provisions other than changes to the standard deduction, such as an increase in the adjusted gross income limit, mean that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may change the composition of giving but that it is unlikely to have a large impact on overall giving. To supplement our analytical narrative, we present statistics on the pattern of charitable giving and estimate a predictive autoregressive model of overall charitable giving. The results show that the change in giving after the implementation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cannot be distinguished from zero. We conclude that misleading interpretations about the effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on overall charitable giving are due to the omission of political economy from the analysis.