Linking Data on Campaign Contributions and Government Grants

Nonprofit-Open-Data-Collective Written by

Campaign Contributions by Non‐profit Executives and Government Grants

Christian Cox

ABSTRACT: United States election candidates seek monetary support for their campaigns and many individuals oblige. Non‐profit organizations are limited in their political spending, but their executives, in a personal capacity, are not. This paper investigates whether individual campaign contributions are a political workaround for non‐profits. I pair non‐profit tax filings and Federal Election Commission records to form the first large‐scale panel linking non‐profit executive contributions and non‐profit financials. My analysis covers the 1998, 2000 and 2002 elections for 29,682 non‐profit organizations. I estimate a series of models and find an economically significant, robust and positive relationship.

Cox, C. (2019), Campaign Contributions by Non‐profit Executives and Government Grants. Oxf Bull Econ Stat. doi:10.1111/obes.12341

New Database on Government and Nonprofit Grants

Thompson Grants, a division of CBIS, is pleased to announce that it has completed a significant expansion to its grant-finding database, GrantScape, by incorporating awards data from IRS Form 990 financial data sets and USAspending.gov, the repository for all awards data for the federal government, under a unified taxonomy and structure. This process has added over 34 million award records and over 2 million unique recipients, representing $250 billion in private awards funding and $110 trillion in federal awards funding.

List of Useful Databases for Nonprofit Scholarship

The Generosity Commission is a non-partisan organization that promotes research on changes in the level of volunteering and charitable giving in the United States.

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