Volume 37, Number 3 (Summer) 2002
Cunningham, Breandan M. and Carlena K. Cochi-Ficano. 2002. "The Determinants of Donative Revenue Flows from Alumni of Higher Education: An Empirical Inquiry." Journal of Human Resources 37(3):540-569.
Institutions of higher education are increasingly relying upon alumni giving and endowment earnings as sources of funding. This paper utilizes a new database on average alumni donations at the institutional level and institutional characteristics to explore the role that lagged institutional characteristics and policy have on subsequent donations to the institution. Our results confirm the noncontemporaneous effects of variations in the average scholastic achievement of matriculated students (a proxy for both student quality and student socioeconomic status) on subsequent donative revenue flows and indirectly address some of the open questions left by previous theoretical inquiries.
Brendan M. Cunningham is a professor of economics at the U. S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., Carlena K. Cochi-Ficano is a professor of economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta. N. Y. This paper was presented at the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute Conference on Financing Education Institutions in the 21st Century. They authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for extremely helpful comments. They would also like to acknowledge the generosity of Peterson's, a Thompson Learning Company. and Mark Zidzik thereof, for providing access to their Archival Undergraduate Database. Maurice Leblanc and Laura Pasckiewicz provided extremely capable research assistance for this paper. The authors take responsibility for all errors. The data in this article can be obtained beginning November 2002 through October 2005 from Cochi Ficano. Department of Economics, Yager Hall Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY 13820.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X