Research

Hong, Minji (2025). Funding the Mission by Funding the Back Office: Evidence from the Paycheck Protection Program  

[Won the 2025 ARNOVA Best Conference Paper Award and Emerging Scholars Program. Complete draft available upon request]

• Award Citation: This paper was chosen for the ARNOVA Best Conference Paper Award because it exemplifies both theoretical innovation and methodological excellence. It tackles an important and underexplored issue regarding how unrestricted or overhead funding can lead to positive spillover effects on mission-related activities. The author(s) ground their analysis in conditional grant theory and use the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as a natural experiment to assess whether funding allocated specifically for administrative costs, such as payroll, can indirectly enhance an organization’s mission delivery. Their findings challenge the "overhead myth" by providing strong empirical evidence that supporting operational functions can improve nonprofit performance. What further sets this paper apart is its use of advanced causal inference methods, including doubly robust difference-in-differences and synthetic control techniques. These sophisticated approaches are rarely applied in nonprofit research and significantly strengthen the credibility of the results. Overall, the paper was selected for its clear contribution to advancing both the theory and practice of nonprofit management, offering timely insights backed by rigorous analysis.

Hong, Minji. Tying Their Own Hands: The Effectiveness and Unintended Consequences of Self-Imposed Debt Limits
[Won the 2025 National Tax Association Fiscal Sustainability Fellowship. Complete draft available upon request]

• This study provides one of the first empirical tests of municipal "self-imposed" debt limits. Using a NSF-funded large-scale survey data from 3,000 municipal governments across the U.S., I investigate whether these internal constraints effectively curb municipal debt. My findings are nuanced; while these limits do not reduce debt issuance in the short term, they do negatively influence the change in long-term debt. This suggests that self-imposed limits function not as a hard ceiling on borrowing but as a brake on the pace of debt accumulation, enabling more deliberate long-term financial planning.

Hong, Minji. How Do Nonprofits Use Flexible Funding? Evidence from Unrestricted Grants
[Complete draft available upon request]

• This paper addresses an untested debate on whether increased financial freedom encourages nonprofits to spend in ways that maximize organizational utility or align more closely with donors’ interests. Drawing on the economic theory of lump-sum grants and stewardship theory, I employ Instrumental Variable (IV) and system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) to show that unrestricted funds increases program expenses but does not significantly affect overhead spending.