Congratulations to former doctoral fellows Peter Schubert (2019), Dr. Diarmuid McDonnell (2016), and Dr. ChiaKo Hung (2017), for having made the Editor’s Choice Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Quarterly’s (NVSQ) top articles from 2018-2019 list. Out of the 14 articles highlighted, NVSQ selected three from Peter Frumkin’s summer Doctoral Fellows alumni.
Doctoral student Peter Schubert and Dr. Silke Boenigk’s article The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle: Empirical Evidence From a German Context, investigates whether the German nonprofit sector is affected by the nonprofit starvation cycle. The nonprofit starvation cycle is the phenomenon where nonprofit organizations continuously underinvest in their organizational infrastructure. This underinvestment is in response to external expectations for low overhead expenditure. By drawing on nonprofit financial data from 2006 to 2015, Schubert and Dr. Boenigk investigate if this phenomenon manifests itself in the form of falling overhead ratios over time. Contrary to previous findings in the U.S. nonprofit sector, they have found that reported overhead ratios have decreased among organizations without government funding and that these decreases originate from cuts in fundraising expenses. Schubert is a doctoral student at the University of Hamburg in Germany. His research interests revolve around financial management and accountability of nonprofit organizations. Specifically, Schubert’s research is on the nonprofit starvation cycle phenomenon. He is investigating stakeholder expectations towards cost efficiency and the pressure these expectations create for nonprofit organizations to underspend on organizational infrastructure.
Dr. Diarmuid McDonnell and Dr. Alasdair C. Rutherford’s article The Determinants of Charity Misconduct, explores the nature, extent, and determinants of charity misconduct in the context of the United Kingdom. Through the utilization of a dataset of 25,611 charities for the period 2006-2014 in Scotland, McDonnell and Rutherford have developed models to predict two dimensions of charity misconduct. These dimensions are regulatory investigation and subsequent action. Through a multivariate analysis they reveal a disconnect between charities suspected of misconduct and those subject to subsequent regulatory action. Dr. McDonnell is currently a research fellow in social policy at University of Birmingham, centering research on charitable organizations, studying their accountability behavior and motivations, and regulatory environment.