• Bridging the Gap: The Role of the Charity in Voluntary Public Good Provision (BE Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy)

  This paper investigates how donors to food assistance charities respond to exogenous changes in recipients' unmet needs. When food insecurity rises by one percentage point, the average food assistance charity increases fundraising by 0.9%. Without this response, private contributions would have fallen by at least 0.2%. These results are consistent with a model in which economic inequality simultaneously raises the donor's marginal benefit of giving and reduces their awareness of the recipient's circumstances. Charitable fundraising plays a key role in maintaining the charity's revenues at a time when they are most needed.

• Effects of COVID-19 on the Nonprofit Sector (with Jennifer Mayo; National Tax Journal)

  This paper studies the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the U.S. nonprofit sector. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we leverage variation in the timing of charities’ fiscal years, finding that government intervention helped keep charities afloat during the pandemic. On average, government grants increased 66% in the first year of the pandemic, and 82% in the second. Despite the net increase in their contributions, charities exposed to the pandemic in fiscal year 2019 lost employees and made fewer program expenditures than those with no exposure in fiscal year 2019. Although the decline in program services proved to be temporary, the pandemic has had a lasting impact on the nonprofit labor market.

• Polarizing the Donorate: Charitable Giving and Negative Political Advertisements (Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing)

  Does inflammatory political rhetoric undermine the voluntary provision of public goods? This paper addresses this question by combining Form 990 data on charitable giving with Wesleyan Media Project data on political advertising and a text-based measure of charity ideology. Attack advertising creates political polarization, which discourages giving to ideological charities, and encourages giving to non-ideological charities. These results suggest that divisive political rhetoric may actually strengthen nonpartisan civil society.

• Taking from Charity? Political Contributions and the Market for Charitable Funds (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization)

  How do charities respond to cyclical increases in competition from political campaigns? This paper is the first to estimate the elasticity of charities' fundraising expenses to political contributions, and the first to use charity-level data to estimate the cross-elasticity of private charitable giving to political contributions. When political donations rise, they lead the average charity to cut back on fundraising. This is costly: political contributions crowd out private charitable giving at a rate of $0.37 per dollar. After netting out the negative effect of political contributions on fundraising, political giving crowds charitable giving in, rather than out. Substantial heterogeneity is documented across cause areas.

Publications