Donors and other stakeholders in nonprofit organizations often judge them by two measures. One is the percent of their spending that goes to programs, rather than towards the “overhead” fundraising or management and general functions. The second is their fundraising efficiency, defined as...

I examine whether donors favor charities that use high quality auditors and whether the propensity to donate varies directly with audit quality. I find that audit quality affects donor decisions in the market for contributions. From a signaling perspective, charities benefit simply from engaging...

One hundred forty characters seems like too small a space for any meaningful information to be exchanged, but Twitter users have found creative ways to get the most out of each Tweet by using different communication tools. This paper looks into how 73 nonprofit organizations use Twitter to...

Nonprofits across the nation are increasingly launching earned-income ventures to support their social missions. Even though this is not a new strategy for many nonprofits, for the sector as a whole it is a fundamental shift from traditional sources of revenue. This study identifies and...

The law on nonprofit directors’ obligations is sparse and fragmented. Most of the discussion over the years is lore rather than law based on commentators’ suggestions for best practices. This article attempts a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the law relating to nonprofit...

Nonprofit organizations operate taxable activities in two general ways: as unrelated businesses operated by the nonprofit or through controlled subsidiaries. Prior research and regulatory attention has focused on unrelated business activities, although taxable subsidiaries generate at least as...

Entrepreneurs who start new firms may choose not-for-profit status as a means of committing to soft incentives. Such incentives protect donors, volunteers, consumers and employees from ex post expropriation of profits by the entrepreneur. We derive conditions under which completely...

Empowerment is one of the most important social value creation activities performed by social enterprises (SEs). Despite the burgeoning research on SEs, there is limited research on the meaning and aspects of empowerment from the SE perspective, or the so-called SE-as-Empowerment research. In...

We study the market for child care services, with a special focus on examining competition between for- and nonprofits. We estimate a two-stage oligopoly model of product differentiation. The first stage estimates a model of endogenous market structure and the second stage corrects for market...