{"title":"Taking from charity? Political contributions and the market for charitable funds","authors":"Stephanie Karol","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106877","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>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.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106877"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268124004918","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization is devoted to theoretical and empirical research concerning economic decision, organization and behavior and to economic change in all its aspects. Its specific purposes are to foster an improved understanding of how human cognitive, computational and informational characteristics influence the working of economic organizations and market economies and how an economy structural features lead to various types of micro and macro behavior, to changing patterns of development and to institutional evolution. Research with these purposes that explore the interrelations of economics with other disciplines such as biology, psychology, law, anthropology, sociology and mathematics is particularly welcome.