2016/03/29 by Jiahuan Lu
Social Sciences · #Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering #Religion, Society, and Development #Social Capital and Networks
paper · doi:10.1002/nml.21203
openalex publication_date 2016/03/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Do government grants displace or leverage private donations to nonprofit organizations? Although research on this topic is flourishing, the findings remain extremely contradictory, creating difficulty in developing a cumulative knowledge available to scholars and practitioners. This study employs a meta‐analysis to systematically synthesize the competing findings from the existing literature. Using a sample of sixty original studies with 637 effect sizes, this study finds government grants have almost no correlation with private donations. In addition, this study demonstrates, through meta‐regression, that nonprofit subsector variation, organizational age as a control, longitudinal data structure, and endogeneity correction help explain the effect size heterogeneity within and across original studies. Nonprofits should be more concerned about the capacity of competing for different funding sources rather than the tradeoff among them.