The past decade has seen an increase in public attention on the role of campaign donations
and outside spending. This has led some donors to seek ways of skirting disclosure …

Not every group that spends money on campaigns or candidate-related speech is a political
committee. If that were so, only politicians, parties, and PACs would have a voice in election …

We report the results of a field experiment conducted in New York City during the 2013
election cycle, examining the impact of nonpartisan messages on donations from small …

In a recent issue of The Forum, Fortier and Malbin call for more research into the effects of
disclosure requirements for campaign finance. In this paper, we report the results of a field …

Using hand-collected data on political contributions from undisclosed sources, we document
novel stylized facts on “dark money” and its role in elections and politician type. Over the …

The deregulation in campaign finance, stemming from the 2010 United States Supreme
Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, has led to nonprofit …

Because money, unlike votes, is not distributed equally, it is essential to understand how
well the views of those who contribute are representative of the larger electorate. We present …

Is charitable giving politically motivated? In this article, we use exhaustive administrative
household panel data and a natural experiment to quantify empirically the motivations for …

Since 2010, independent expenditures have grown as a source of spending in American
elections. A large and growing portion comes from “dark money” groups—political nonprofits …

An important question in public economics is to what extent changes in government funding
lead to changes in private donations. In this chapter we identify and summarize four …