Nonprofit charitable organizations are exempt from most taxes, including local property taxes, but U.S. cities and towns increasingly request that nonprofits make payments in lieu of taxes (known as PILOTs). Strictly speaking, PILOTs are voluntary, though nonprofits may feel pressure to make...

Nonprofit hospitals receive favorable tax treatment in exchange for providing socially beneficial activities. Extending this rationale would suggest that, insofar as suppression of competition would allow nonprofits to cross-subsidize care for needy populations, nonprofit hospital mergers should...

Need fluctuates over the business cycle. We conduct a survey revealing a desire for nonprofit activities to countercyclically expand during downturns. We then demonstrate, using comprehensive US nonprofit data drawn from millions of tax returns, that the public's hopes are disappointed....

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...

Using the Beginning Postsecondary Student Survey and Transcript Data, we find no statistically significant differential return to certificate or Associate's degrees between for-profits and not-for-profits. Point estimates suggest a slightly lower return to a for-profit certificate and a slightly...

Despite the conceptual differences between for-profit and non-profit firms stressed in conventional economic analyses of the non-profit sector, U.S. antitrust law generally does not distinguish between these two organizational forms. This paper argues that the same incentives to restrain trade...

Many factors including incentive-pay, powerful shareholders, and takeover threats push for-profits managers towards maximizing shareholder value. One of the most striking factors about non-profit firms is that they have no comparable governance institutions, and the only check on managers are...

This paper studies the governance of a sample of California hospitals. We document a number of empirical relations about hospital governance: The composition of the board of directors varies systematically across ownership types; poor performance and low levels of uncompensated care increase...

Although the not-for-profit sector contributes greatly to aggregate output in many industries, there is little explicit analysis of the consequences of applying antitrust policy in this sector. This paper argues that the same incentives to collude exist in the non-profit sector as in the...