Does Mandatory Disclosure Matter? The Case of Nonprofit Fundraising

Autor: Putnam Barber, Brian D. Galle, Megan M. Farwell
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 51:31-52
ISSN: 1552-7395
0899-7640
DOI: 10.1177/08997640211001458
Popis: Do donors seek out potentially adverse information about organizations making fundraising appeals? Do they react when it is readily available? Do they draw negative inferences when critical information is not available? To answer these questions, we consider previously unexamined large-scale natural experiments involving U.S. charitable organizations—tax-exempt organizations that file Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990. Using standard difference-in-differences designs, we find that donors penalize organizations with high fundraising costs when there is mandatory disclosure or involuntary disclosure by a third-party reporter. Organizations with lower fundraising costs fundraise more successfully in the presence of these disclosures. The contrast with donors’ behavior when such information is not available suggests that donors do not draw correct inferences when potentially consequential information is not disclosed. Disclose-on-request requirements, in contrast, apparently do not have any significant impact on donors’ or organizations’ behavior. We then sketch implications for the regulation of donations to charities and their modern cousins, such as crowdfunding and social enterprise organizations.
Databáze: OpenAIRE