Public finance and charitable church activity

Churches are important social service providers and the availability of public funding for churches has increased dramatically in recent years. In this dissertation I examine the determinants of charitable church activity, such as congregations supporting soup kitchens and homeless shelters.; In the first chapter of the dissertation I examine whether government welfare activities can substitute for charitable church activities. Using a new panel dataset Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations and a new identification strategy based on provisions of the 1996 Welfare Reform law, the results indicate that government welfare programs substitute for charitable church activity. The results suggest that a dollar of government welfare spending crowds out 20 to 38 cents of charitable church spending.; In the second chapter I investigate whether churchgoers' propensity to provide charitable services is affected by the race of the charitable recipients. Using three different datasets of charitable church activity, I find that churches comprised entirely of white members become less charitably active as the share of black residents in the community increases. This result is very robust to different specifications and tests.; In the third chapter (coauthored with Jonathan Gruber) we consider whether New Deal spending crowded out church activity during the Great Depression. We use a new dataset describing the charitable activities of six large denominations from 1929 to 1939. We instrument for New Deal spending using both measures of the political strength of a state's congressional delegation and institutional constraints on state relief spending. We find that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939.