Research
Nonprofit financial management is the core. Public budgeting extends the question across sectors.
I examine how revenue strategies and public policies shape organizational stability, service delivery, and the distribution of costs. Finance provides the common foundation of this work; equity directs attention to who bears the greatest risks when resources tighten.
Research architecture
A connected program of inquiry
The agenda moves across organizations and sectors while keeping the same underlying concern: how financial constraints alter choices, services, and distributional outcomes.
Primary stream
Nonprofit Financial Management
My dissertation and related manuscripts examine how revenue structure affects financial vulnerability, growth, accountability, and program decisions.
Nonprofits increasingly combine donations, grants, fees, and commercial income. My work moves beyond treating commercial or donative revenue as uniformly stabilizing or risky. I examine how their consequences depend on the outcome being considered, the services an organization provides, and the environment in which it operates.
This research draws on resource-dependence and portfolio perspectives while emphasizing the practical problem facing boards and funders: whether a particular revenue model supports program continuity or creates new forms of vulnerability.
Commercial and Donative Revenue Reliance and Financial Vulnerability Across U.S. Nonprofit Subsectors
Moves beyond one-dimensional measures of financial health by evaluating revenue models across specific vulnerability outcomes and service environments.
- Data
- IRS Form 990 public-charity panel, 2013-2023
- Design
- Lagged revenue-reliance measures, organization fixed effects, year fixed effects, and subsector interactions
Revenue Reliance & Financial Vulnerability
Tests whether commercial and donative revenue reliance predicts subsequent vulnerability across U.S. nonprofit subsectors using Form 990 panel data.
Unrelated Business Activity & Growth
Uses dynamic panel models to examine whether unrelated business activity supports revenue, asset, and program-expense growth across nonprofit subsectors.
Program Creation & Revenue-Model Choice
Uses interviews with Canadian charity executives to explain how financial vulnerability and revenue models enter decisions to create or expand programs.
Second stream
Public Budgeting & Local Finance
This line examines how state fiscal constraints affect local governments' ability to finance services and why apparently uniform rules produce different consequences across communities.
The Impact of Texas Senate Bill 2 on Municipal Tax Rates: Evidence from 1,101 Cities
Shows that a uniform statewide tax limit can produce unequal local adjustments: lower-income cities reduced rates more sharply while wealthier cities maintained stronger levy-per-capita outcomes.
- Data
- Panel of 1,101 Texas municipalities, 2016-2024
- Design
- Difference-in-differences with local fiscal and economic heterogeneity
Using Texas Senate Bill 2 as a policy setting, I study how cities adjust tax rates and levy growth under a state-imposed property-tax constraint. The results show that average policy effects can conceal unequal local adjustments across tax bases and economic conditions.
The next step is cross-sector: testing whether constraints on local public revenue shift service demands toward nonprofit organizations that may already be financially vulnerable.
Connected research
Administrative Burden & Public Service
A third line examines the financial and procedural costs people encounter when interacting with public agencies.
Billing-dispute experiment
A randomized survey experiment tests how written guidance and continued financial penalties affect willingness to return to an agency and satisfaction with democracy.
DACA policy disruption
A manuscript under review traces repeated policy changes from 2012-2025 and links instability to learning, compliance, psychological costs, and public-service avoidance.
Five-year agenda
From financial vulnerability to resilience and service continuity
The next phase connects longitudinal financial records, organizational surveys, executive interviews, and cross-sector public-finance data.
Publish the dissertation studies and extend the vulnerability paper longitudinally
Examine whether vulnerable nonprofits recover, experience persistent program contraction, or exit; establish a U.S.-Canada comparison of nonprofit resilience; and complement Form 990 analysis with survey evidence on funding disruptions and service demand.
Integrate cross-sector finance and organizational response
Study whether vulnerable nonprofits change revenue mix, discontinue programs, merge, or recover; extend the Texas property-tax study into a targeted multistate comparison; and develop agency partnerships for administrative-burden interventions.