Understanding Management and General Expenses in Nonprofits

Abstract

There has been growing coverage by the press and the accounting profession about how nonprofits report their management and general costs. There has also been growing attention by some donors, perhaps made most famously by claims by some donors that nothing should go to administration. While this area of nonprofit management has caught the attention of the public, it has largely escaped the research lens of scholars. This paper is a first step to understanding and explaining what management and general costs look like in the nonprofit sector and whether or not various institutional characteristics such as mission, size, age, sources of revenues, and/or accounting practices can help explain some of the variation in management and general expenses. We find that these institutional characteristics do matter quite a bit in explaining differences in management and general costs in nonprofits.