Joseph Coletti

“For those who have an appetite for politics and the free time to pursue it, this is a journalistic Golden Age,” Alan Ehrenhalt, senior editor of Governing magazine, writes. “For the ordinary voter who thinks about politics only at election time, it is more like a Dark Age.” Ehrenhalt…

Charitable giving is lower in places with competitive politics and giving declines among people when their party is in the minority, NC State professor Richard Clerkin and his co-authors found in a recent paper. Another interesting aspect of the study is its presumption that taxes complement charitable giving,…

One of the currently fashionable complaints about charitable and philanthropic giving of even left-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos is that the money does nothing to help the poor or reduce income inequality. James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley in an essay at Commentary  argue that charitable giving receives a tax…

Before Hurricane Florence hit, Republican legislators had criticized Gov. Roy Cooper for the slow pace of distributing relief funds after 2016’s Hurricane Matthew. Research in India points to the potential for follow-up phone calls to make sure people get the help they have been promised. Just telling randomly selected…

People who are unemployed start their job search with needed optimism, like new entrepreneurs. Their optimism is generally too high for their situation, particularly when they have been unemployed for a long time, but their lack of success finding a job does little to temper their optimism.  New research…

Have you been busy taking advantage of the CyberMonday deals available online today through Wayfair, Overstock, or other online retailers not based in North Carolina? The North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) tried to make shopping more cumbersome for you and those companies. Instead of waiting for direction…

University of Delaware Professor Farley Grubb has developed an impressive body of work examining colonial-era money. He and his former student Cory Cutsail have a new working paper in which they reconstruct North Carolina’s history from 1712 to 1774 issuing its own money, and what exactly that money was.

Nonprofit organizations, like retailers, earn a significant portion of their revenue for a year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. This was the case even before Giving Tuesday. What better time to consider why people give in the first place? Giving USA estimates that tax reform’s change in the…