IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34078.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Risk, Reward, and Asset Allocation of Nonprofit Endowment Funds

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew W. Lo
  • Egor V. Matveyev
  • Stefan Zeume

Abstract

Using tax filings from 374,351 U.S. nonprofit organizations from 2008 to 2020, we provide the first large-scale analysis of endowment prevalence, function, asset allocation, and returns. Endowment use varies systematically across sectors and revenue models. Organizations with endowments scale mission-related spending more effectively and hedge revenue risk through asset allocation. Yet most endowments underperform passive benchmarks, with the weakest performance concentrated among smaller, self-managed funds. Advisory fees are positively correlated with gross returns but negatively with net returns, suggesting overpayment for investment services. Stronger governance, lower discretionary spending, and the use of outsourced CIOs are associated with better performance.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew W. Lo & Egor V. Matveyev & Stefan Zeume, 2025. "The Risk, Reward, and Asset Allocation of Nonprofit Endowment Funds," NBER Working Papers 34078, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34078
    Note: AP CF PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34078.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G2 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • G29 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Other

    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:34078. 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.