IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/27888.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Calculating DAF Payout and What We Learn When We Do It Correctly

Author

Listed:
  • James Andreoni
  • Ray Madoff

Abstract

The tremendous increase in the use of donor-advised funds for charitable donations has led policy-makers to ask if there is sufficient regulation and oversight of DAFs. In the absence of account level reporting, the debate has focused on the average payout rates of DAF sponsoring organizations, which have been reported by the DAF industry to exceed 20%. We show that the industry-preferred method for calculating payout rate overstates the correct payout by more than 50%. We then argue that the flow rate is uninformative unless grounded in the stock of assets held by the DAF sponsor. We suggest a different measure of flow we call the stockpiling rate. Finally, we show that transfers between DAFSs cause DAF grants to be overstated. Reporting transfers separately would allow a more precise estimate of flow.

Suggested Citation

  • James Andreoni & Ray Madoff, 2020. "Calculating DAF Payout and What We Learn When We Do It Correctly," NBER Working Papers 27888, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27888
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w27888.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. D. Phillips Susan & Dalziel Katherine & Sjogren Keith, 2021. "Donor Advised Funds in Canada, Australia and the US: Differing Regulatory Regimes, Differing Streams of Policy Drift," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 12(3), pages 409-441, October.
    2. Jawad, Muhammad & Naz, Munazza, 2023. "Environmental change through financial innovation: A systematic analysis of Program-Related donations," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    3. Murray Ian, 2023. "Donor Advised Funds & Delay: An Intergenerational Justice Solution?," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 14(1), pages 51-76, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate
    • H83 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues - - - Public Administration

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27888. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.