Giving to Organizations that Help People in Need: Differences Across Denominational Identities

Abstract

This article reports the results of an analysis of charitable giving to basic necessity organizations that help people in need of food, shelter, or other basic necessities (e.g., Feeding America, the local food bank or homeless shelter, Habitat for Humanity, etc.)—and asks whether giving to such organizations varies across denominational identities. I answer this question using data from three waves of the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study, a module within the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that enables three innovative analyses. The Center Panel is the first survey to collect data on dollar amounts given specifically to necessity organizations, enabling an analysis of the magnitude of giving as well as the probability of giving. Moreover, it is possible to estimate dollar amounts given beyond what people with denominational identities give to their church, synagogue, mosque, or other place of worship. In addition, because the Center Panel is part of the PSID, how giving to necessity organizations differs across families with different denominational identities can be estimated using regressions that contain high-quality controls for differences in families’ income and wealth. This is important because income and wealth differ across denominational identities (Keister 2003, 2008) and failure to adequately control for income and wealth would lead to spurious findings. Finally, the Center Panel prospectively collects multiple years of giving data, enabling us to present the first analysis of giving to necessity organizations over a multiple-year period. This is important because there likely is a strong year-to-year dynamic in giving to necessity organizations, just as there is in aggregate giving (Rooney, Brown, and Wu 2007).