What Big Data Can Tell Us About Government Awards to the Nonprofit Sector : Using the FAADS

This paper introduces nonprofit scholars to the Federal Assistance Award Data System (FAADS), an online archive which contains the full universe of federal grant activity. Relatively little academic research has used this extensive data source. The paper profiles federal grant flows to the nonprofit sector over a ten year period. From the FAADS data we are able to offer a thorough analysis of the origins, magnitudes, and structure of federal grants to various nonprofit industries. Furthermore, we are able to link individual grants to subsequent firm behaviors on a much larger scale that has been previously attempted in the literature.The program to generate a crosswalk between the FAADS and nonprofit 990 financial data can be accessed at their website