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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Why Give if Someone Else Will? Evidence of Crowd-Out in a Crowdfunding Platform. (with Piruz Saboury) [Job Market Paper]

We study the application of crowdfunding to philanthropy. An important feature of crowdfunding platforms is that the fundraiser will only receive the donations if a minimum contribution threshold is met before a given deadline. Moreover, by construction, donors move sequentially, and potential donors observe the sum of past donations. Therefore, any potential donor can infer the probability that a posted project will be funded by future donors. In particular, the higher the sum of accumulated donations or the time left until the fundraising deadline, the more likely it is that the project is funded by future donors, which in turn, leads to less giving incentives for an altruistic potential donor. This phenomenon is a form of the well-known free-riding or crowd-out problem in the provision of public goods. Analyzing data from a prominent crowdfunding platform, we find evidence that supports the presence of this foreword-looking crowd-out behavior among donors.

Old Title: How Do Late Donors Learn from Early Donors in Crowdfunding?

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Charitable Giving Responses to Education Budgets, with Jonathan Meer. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 29331.  [Accepted for publication in Economic Inquiry]

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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Immigration, Cultural Distance, and Voting Behavior: 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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