How Effective Are Charity Managers? Evidence from a Panel of Charities

Abstract

This paper presents the first causal evidence of the role that charity managers play in the financial performance of a charity. Using a novel dataset of Canadian charities, I find that a one standard deviation increase in manager ability leads to a 0.516 standard deviation increase in total revenue, which amounts to over $650,000. Married couples are found to have a larger effect than individuals and female managers are showed to have a larger effect than male managers. I then present extensions that show that the baseline model overestimates the effect of the managers.