Founded in 1441, King's College was one of Cambridge University's wealthiest Colleges, endowed with a vast agricultural portfolio. John Maynard Keynes was appointed bursar just after WWI and initiated a major reallocation to equities, an innovation at least as radical as the late 20th century...

The recent proposal for tax reform developed by the Department of the Treasury suggests dramatic changes in the structure of the personal income tax. One likely side effect of the changes will be a significant adverse impact on the level of charitable contributions by individuals.This paper...

We present the first estimates of investment returns and distribution rates for U.S. non-profit endowment funds, based on a comprehensive sample of 29,762 organizations drawn from Internal Revenue Service filings for 2009-2017. Non-profit endowments badly underperform market benchmarks, with...

The tremendous increase in the use of donor-advised funds for charitable donations has led policy-makers to ask if there is sufficient regulation and oversight of DAFs. In the absence of account level reporting, the debate has focused on the average payout rates of DAF sponsoring organizations,...

In the absence of owners, how effective are the constraints imposed by the state in promoting effective firm governance? This paper develops state-level indices of the legal and reporting rules facing not-for-profits and examines the effects of these rules on not-for-profit behavior. Stronger...

A common approach to the management of endowment is to treat it as if it were the only asset of the university. This approach leads to prescriptions for optimal investment and expenditure policies that are essentially the same across universities. Indeed, the resulting optimal portfolio...

Tax return data, which has been a principal source for econometric investigations of the behavioral response to tax policy, is subject to misreporting that may bias estimates of tax responsiveness. The misreporting arises because understatement of taxable income may itself be a function of an...

Using data for more than 800 college and university endowment funds over 2003-2011, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the spending policies used in practice as well as how frequently and why those mandates are revised over time. Given the long-term and relatively static nature of the...