RESEARCH

''Effects of the Minimum Wage on the Nonprofit Sector'' Joint with Jonathan Meer. 

Oxford Economic Papers, Volume 75, Issue 4, October 2023, Pages 1012–1032.

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"Legal Access to Reproductive Control Technology, Women's Education, and Earnings Approaching Retirement."

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 119:231-35, 2020. Joint with Jason Lindo, Mayra Pineda-Torres, and David Pritchard.

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How Do Late Donors Learn from Early Donors in Crowdfunding? (with Piruz Saboury) [Job Market Paper]

The application of crowdfunding to philanthropy has not yet been studied extensively. We focus on the sequential nature of giving on crowdfunding platforms. On the one hand, this feature exacerbates donors' incentives to free-ride. On the other hand, sequential giving provides an opportunity for leadership-giving by early donors. In particular, late donors' conditional cooperation due to moral obligation, reciprocity, social pressure, social norm-compliance, inequality aversion, or self-image concerns can lead to a positive response to early donations by downstream donors. Moreover, early donors can signal their information about the quality of the public good to downstream donors, which can induce a similar positive response. We use data from a prominent crowdfunding platform to estimate early donations' effect on later donations. We find evidence that supports altruism and free-riding being the main drivers of donor behavior in crowdfunding platforms.

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Charitable Giving Responses to Education Budgets, with Jonathan Meer. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 29331.  [R&R]

Do changes in government spending affect voluntary contributions to those recipients? We examine how changes in K-12 education budgets impact donations to teachers using data from DonorsChoose.org, an online crowdfunding platform for public school teachers to
raise money for their classrooms. Using a district-year panel and instruments to address the endogeneity of budgets, we find evidence for crowd-out of private giving, though the magnitudes are fairly small in this setting and do not offset a large proportion of a budget
change. These results are driven by entirely teachers' posting of requests, illustrating the importance of considering the demand side of the charitable giving market. [Latest Version]

 

The Effect of Teacher Strikes on Support for Schools

Opinion polls suggest that the public supports teacher strikes. I examine the impact of teacher strikes on voluntary financial support for schools as a revealed-preference measure of support. I use data from DonorsChoose.org, an online crowdfunding platform for school teachers to fund their classroom projects, combined with teacher strikes' timing and locations across the United States. Variation in the timing of the strikes across school districts does not affect overall private contributions. I do not find any changes in fundraising activities
around the strikes.

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Determinants of Immigrant Labour Market Integration: Evidence from the United Kingdom

Improving Visitor Experience through Analysis of Visitor Foot Traffic and Donations (with Tatiana Kornienko)

​The Effect of COVID-19 Closures on Support for Education (with Benjamin Hansen and Jonathan Meer)

Can Nonprofits Help Buffer the Negative Impacts of Poverty?

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