Campaign Contributions by Non-profit Executives and Government Grants

United States election candidates seek monetary support for their campaigns and many individuals oblige. Non-profit organizations are limited in their political spending, but their executives, in a personal capacity, are not. This paper investigates whether individual campaign contributions are a political workaround for non-profits. I pair non-profit tax filings and Federal Election Commission records to form the first large-scale panel linking non-profit executive contributions and non-profit financials. My analysis covers the 1998, 2000 and 2002 elections for 29,682 non-profit organizations. I estimate a series of models and find an economically significant, robust and positive relationship.