Do donors seek out potentially adverse information about organizations making fundraising appeals? Do they react when it is readily available? Do they draw negative inferences when critical information is not available? To answer these questions, we consider previously unexamined large-scale natural experiments involving U.S. charitable organizations—tax-exempt organizations that file Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990. Using standard difference-in-differences designs, we find that donors penalize organizations with high fundraising costs when there is mandatory disclosure or involuntary disclosure by a third-party reporter. Organizations with lower fundraising costs fundraise more successfully in the presence of these disclosures. The contrast with donors’ behavior when such information is not available suggests that donors do not draw correct inferences when potentially consequential information is not disclosed. Disclose-on-request requirements, in contrast, apparently do not have any significant impact on donors’ or organizations’ behavior. We then sketch implications for the regulation of donations to charities and their modern cousins, such as crowdfunding and social enterprise organizations.

捐助者是否寻找有关组织进行募捐呼吁的潜在不利信息？随时可用时，他们会做出反应吗？当关键信息不可用时，他们是否会得出否定的推论？为了回答这些问题，我们考虑了以前未经审查的涉及美国慈善组织的大型自然实验，这些慈善组织提交了国税局（IRS）表格990。当第三方报告者强制披露或非自愿披露时，筹款成本很高。在存在这些披露的情况下，具有较低筹资成本的组织可以更成功地筹集资金。当此类信息不可用时，与捐赠者行为的对比表明，当未披露潜在的后果性信息时，捐赠者不会得出正确的推论。相比之下，按要求披露要求显然对捐赠者或组织的行为没有任何重大影响。然后，我们概述了对慈善机构及其近代表亲（如众筹和社会企业组织）的捐赠进行监管的意义。