Corporate Support for Artistic and Cultural Activities: What Determines the Distribution of Corporate Giving?

This paper examines the allocation of corporate donations among various categories of recipients and the reasons underlying that allocation. Ananalytical model is utilized to determine the importance of profitability,firm size, advertising expenditures and type of business in determining thelevel of support for each activity. The results demonstrate that corporategiving to artistic/cultural activities is correlated with advertisingexpenditures, while donations to educational, civic and health causes are not.Thus, support for culture and the arts is a means of directly promoting thefirm, while giving to other causes fulfills the firm's goals throughalternative means.