How US Private Foundations Change Payouts Based on Financial Shocks: Revealed Publicness or Revealed Privateness?
研究美国私人基金会在经济衰退时是否增加支出以帮助受助者，实证发现基金会倾向于收缩或独立于经济周期，而非逆周期增加支出。
Abstract This article asks what distribution behavior of private foundations in the United States reveals about their motivations and strategy. Do private foundations intentionally distribute additional money to grantees to help them manage through business cycles and maintain services during economic downturns? Such behavior would be consistent with revealed publicness with respect to distributions. Do they retrench during difficult economic times to protect their endowments? Or do they simply distribute money independent from the larger economy? The current study considers these conflicting expectations, and empirically tests whether private foundation distributions vary with endowment returns and the larger economy as suggested by competing theories. Using administrative data filed with the Internal Revenue Service, fixed effects regression models indicate that private foundations change distributions in a manner consistent with retrenchment or independently from the larger economy, depending on the sample used. The results do not support the notion that private foundations act with prosocial-countercyclical motivations about distributions—in which more money is distributed during economic downturns—despite their receiving significant public subsidies.