Search results

Academic libraries often wish to build endowments as a principal goal of fund raising activities. For example, one library development brochure begins: “Northwestern University Library's most pressing need is for endowed funds for the purchase of library materials.” Because carefully managed endowments can yield sustained purchasing power, they can assure the sustained collecting essential for building the most useful research collections. Some libraries, like Vanderbilt's, have endowments that help support maintenance of a library building. Creating an endowment for building maintenance is a natural concomitant of raising funds to build because it serves much the same purpose: sustaining library operations over the long term.

To examine the relationship between financial resources and variables associated with institutional rankings in the USA.

Pearson product moment correlation coefficient was used to investigate the relationship between endowment funds and variables associated with rankings as determined by the U.S. News & World Report.

College costs continue to increase faster than per capita income. Institutions are relying more on endowment funds to meet their needs. Endowment was positively associated with almost all the variables used for ranking top national doctoral universities with the largest endowment amounts. When endowment per student was used, the association became even stronger with these ranking variables. Endowment was weakly associated with almost all the variables used for ranking top national doctoral universities with the lowest endowment amounts. Relationships of endowment and ranking variables were stronger at medical research schools, business schools, and weaker at engineering schools.

Higher education administrators must realize that these variables are cost‐inducing factors that cannot be fully satisfied. Unbridled pursuit of ranking variables will increase cost without commensurate increase in educational quality. Therefore, leaders must decide what rankings their resources allow and what position within the ranks is acceptable to them. Ranking agencies interested in quality should realize that money plays a significant role in how an institution is ranked. Therefore, institutions should be grouped according to the available resources before comparative analysis of ranking variables is made.

State funding is being reduced for higher education institutes (HEIs) is linked to several checks such as performance-based incentives (Hagood, 2019). This forces HEIs to look for other options for funding. Endowment funds are now becoming the main source of revenue for HEIs (Sörlin, 2007), largely provided by alumni. Thus, this study aims to examine the factors that lead to donor behavior in terms of university endowment funds.

Based on a sample of 627 participants in the survey from public universities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and 625 from public/private universities of the United States of America (USA), the authors conducted a cross-sectional survey-based analysis. Hypotheses were tested with regression analysis.

The results revealed that in the USA, donors with substantial prestige within the institution are more likely to contribute to the endowment fund; however, in the KSA, this relationship was insignificant. Additionally, this study found that participation, brand interpretation and satisfaction positively impact identification with an organization, leading to donor behavior.

This research has successfully identified psychological factors for endowment funding; however, mediating or moderating variables affecting donor behavior should also be considered. Further, this study considers only two countries, the KSA and the USA; therefore, a larger cross-cultural context warrants more investigation.

Overall results revealed several means through which the administrators and practitioners may efficiently manage and increase university endowment funds flow. This study's novelty is to conduct a cross-national investigation and identify the psychological factors of donation behavior toward university endowment funds, providing an opportunity for HEIs to understand the psychological factors in detail and motivate their alumni to be one of the important sources of funding even in developing countries.

Many psychological factors underlie alumni's engagement in volunteerism and donation activities, especially in cross-national settings. Following social identity theory, this study explored identity-based donor behavior in terms of supporting universities through endowment funding.

Entrepreneurship is considered as a possible solution to youth unemployment, and the number of initiatives fostering youth entrepreneurship has multiplied accordingly, also in Africa. However, the effectiveness of such initiatives also lies in whether young people display personality and contextual dimensions conducive to starting and running businesses. The purpose of this paper is to examine the composition of young South Africans’ “entrepreneurial endowment”, represented by personality traits and contextual variables commonly associated with entrepreneurship.

This paper surveyed secondary students using a questionnaire constructed from validated measurement instruments, obtaining 827 valid responses. It employed exploratory factor analysis to investigate the composition of respondents’ entrepreneurial endowment. It also compared respondents’ entrepreneurial endowment across demographic variables by means of t-tests and ANOVA.

The results reveal the existence of an entrepreneurial endowment composed of: need for achievement, locus of control, community support, two role models sub-constructs and two family support sub-constructs. Significant differences from the perspective of gender, cultural background and entrepreneurship education also emerged.

The findings confirm that young South Africans have the entrepreneurial endowment needed to be the recipients of entrepreneurship support and highlight relevant differences across demographic variables.

From a theoretical perspective, this paper unveils the structure of young South Africans’ entrepreneurial endowment, composed of four unique dimensions not found in previous research. The insights gained from comparing entrepreneurial endowment results across different groups offer practical implications.

Some members of Congress in the USA have expressed serious concern that endowment spending rates of major American universities are too low. The purpose of this paper is to derive optimal spending rates and compare them with actual rates to determine if this concern is warranted.

A Cobb‐Douglas utility function is used to represent the trade‐off between current spending and endowment (which allows more future spending). Maximization of this function subject to relevant constraints yields a formula for the optimal endowment spending rate, which takes the form of a difference equation. The steady‐state solution to this difference equation is explored, along with the nature of convergence to the steady‐state. Relevant data are obtained from American universities with endowments over $500 million in 2007 to determine the optimal spending rates implied by the theory. These optimal rates are then compared with actual average spending rates.

Actual average spending rates are just below 5 per cent, which is well below the optimal rates of 7‐8 per cent implied by the theory.

The results provide some support for regulations mandating minimum average spending rates from university endowments over time.

This paper is the first to model this problem using a theoretical framework that closely parallels the actual trade‐off considered by university investment managers, and it is the first to compare actual and theoretically optimal rates of endowment spending.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether changing the sequence of proposals during negotiations and changing the order of the responding options might minimize the endowment effect, therefore producing a better chance at reaching an agreement.

The study includes four versions of questionnaires comprised of two identical proposals (one gain and one loss) in reversal sequences, and two identical reimbursement options in reverse order. The four versions aim to allow for a combined investigation of the impact of proposals sequence and the reimbursement options sequence on the endowment effect. Each of the study's 814 participants received one of the four questionnaires. Based on both framing and contrast effects, it is hypothesized that the sequence of proposals – when the first one is conceived as a loss and the second as a gain – has a moderating impact on the endowment effect.

The findings show a significant endowment effect as a high demand inducer in negotiations, and a significant impact of the proposals sequence as a factor that reduces the endowment effect. However, no significant impact of the responding options' order on the endowment effect was found.

The study contributes to the understanding of the impact of proposal sequence in negotiations. Negotiators who understand how to utilize the proposals sequence may lead the negotiation to a concessionary atmosphere.

The paper focuses on the application of the framing and contrast effects to the negotiation process, as well as highlighting the negotiation process, whereby negotiators' insight about the proposal sequence may lead to a better outcome.

The paper aims to help explain how certain smaller university endowments are able to provide investment results that are more typical of much larger endowments. Investment teams' characteristics and risk-reward perceptions are examined in relation to portfolio composition and performance.

This exploratory study uses a grounded-theory approach consisting of 20 in-depth interviews of financial officers at US colleges and universities with assets between $100 million and $200 million. Ten were conducted from the top performance quartile and ten from the bottom quartile. Interviews were transcribed and coded; afterward, emerging themes and constructs were identified. Objective investment performance over a ten-year period was employed from a well-known industry survey.

Top-performing endowments were described as having endowment teams with greater investment expertise, efficacy, decision-making independence and learning commitment than teams from the low-performing endowments. Teams from top-performing endowments assessed alternative investments more favorably and made greater portfolio allocations to them as compared to teams from low-performing endowments.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may not be generalizable.

The paper includes implications for colleges and universities in the management of their endowments, and particularly in the selection of committee and other team members.

The paper is original in exploring certain team characteristics and practices of institutional investment decision-makers and their relationship to portfolio composition and performance.

Purpose and approach – We examine theoretically and experimentally how unequal abilities to contribute affect incentives and efficiency when players compete for membership in stratified groups based on the contributions they make. Players have either a low or a high endowment. Once assigned to a group based on their group contribution, players share equally in their group’s collective output. Depending on the parameters, the mechanism has several distinct equilibria that differ in efficiency.

Findings – Somewhat counter to conventional expectation our theoretical analysis indicates that as long as certain assumptions are satisfied, efficiency increases rather than decreases the more abilities to contribute differ. The analysis also suggests various follow-up experiments about equilibrium selection, tacit coordination, and the effect of unequal abilities in systems with endogenous grouping. We conduct an experiment that shows that subjects tacitly coordinate the mechanism’s asymmetric payoff-dominant equilibrium with precision; this precision is robust to a change in the structure and complexity of the game.

Implications – The results suggest that people respond to merit-based grouping in a natural way and that competitive contribution-based grouping encourages public contributions even when abilities to contribute differ, which is the case in all communities and societies.

This research studies the influence and mechanism of rearing cost and endowment insurance on family fertility desire from the micro perspective.

Through the construction of overlapping generations (OLG) model and on the basis of this research purpose, the research hypothesis proposed by the theoretical model is tested by using the data of China household tracking survey (CFPS).

(1) Endowment insurance has an inhibitory effect on family fertility desire. The marginal effects of participating in old-age insurance on total fertility desire and boy fertility desire are – 3.2% and – 3.6% respectively. (2) The cost of rearing has a significant negative impact on family fertility desire. (3) There is regional heterogeneity in the impact of endowment insurance and rearing cost on fertility desire. (4) There is no significant difference in the impact of endowment insurance on fertility desire between urban and rural areas.

This research tries to fill the gap existing in the international literature by analyzing the micro mechanism of the influence degree of upbringing cost on fertility desire by introducing the rearing cost and fertility rate into the OLG, providing a micro basis for relevant quantitative calculation.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of the contribution made by intellectual capital (IC) to company performance at company and industry levels in the Russian context. It examines the performance effect of IC using a multilevel approach.

The study combines the resource- and industry-based view. It decomposes performance determinants into two levels of analysis in such a way that it is assumed that IC at industry and company levels has a significant simultaneous impact on company performance. The empirical part of the study uses a database of 1,096 Russian public companies, covering the period of 2004–2014 and divided into 19 industries. The econometric methodology uses hierarchical linear models to estimate the effect of IC in the different levels of analysis.

The study confirms that the strength of the performance effect of IC is contingent on the industry. Furthermore, the study reveals that industry-level endowment with regard to intangibles contributes more to company performance in comparison with a company-level endowment, in the context of the transitional economy.

The study proposes a novel methodological approach to the performance effect of IC in the Russian context, studying the differences between industry and company effect. The study provides insights to better understand the importance of the politics of IC at the different levels (industry and company) and presents a new empirical enquiry into strategic behaviour regarding IC in Russia.