The nonprofit starvation cycle is a debilitating trend of under-investment in organizational infrastructure that is fed by potentially misleading financial reporting and donor expectations of increasingly low overhead expenses. Since its original reporting in 2008, the phenomenon has been...

This study examined whether nonprofit organizations diversified their revenue portfolios after the Great Recession and whether nonprofit sectors impact the ability to diversify revenues at the organization level. When governments and private firms do not provide a public good, nonprofits step in...

This paper analyzes adjustment mechanisms for philanthropic organizations in a downturn. In the global philanthropic community, the current economic context and the difficulty to make sense of it have led donors to review their activities. In the 2008 recession, many foundation endowments have...

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....