Participatory budgeting is described as a direct-democracy approach to resource allocation decision making. Theories assume it changes how public resources are spent by moving decisions from elected officials to citizens. The literature does not consider how earmarking—in which legislators direct parts of public budgets directly—might affect the impact of such policy devices. New York City’s participatory budgeting process which uses earmarks is analyzed to determine spending changes. Officials involved fund more projects at lower average amounts than those not involved but do not change the areas of funding, all of which is expected in systems of budgetary earmarks controlled by legislators.

Core, Guay, and Verdi explore whether excessive levels of cash ("endowments") are associated with nonprofits' growth in program spending and fixed assets, agency problems, or donors' monitoring efforts. We replicate their finding that excess endowments are unrelated to growth in program spending. However, unlike the original article, we find that persistent excess endowments are associated with growth in fixed assets. Further, when we alter the model specification to better align with theory, we find excess endowments increase program expense ratios and lead to higher growth in program service spending as well as capital investment. We are also able to replicate the original article's finding that excess

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In 2003, the FASB issued an accounting standard (132R) requiring defined-benefit pension plan sponsors to disclose in the notes the asset allocations of their sponsored pension plans. A motivation for this requirement was to help users evaluate a plan's expected rate of return (ERR) assumption which is supposed to be determined by the allocation of plan assets to risky investments. All else being equal, the higher the assumption, the lower is the pension expense and the higher are reported profits of plan sponsors. We hypothesize that not-for-profits used the ERR to inflate these earnings by reducing pension expenses. Using a dataset of audited financial statements and a difference-in-differences design, we find that not-for-profits significantly decreased their ERRs post-SFAS 132R. The results suggest that opportunistic actuarial assumptions by not-for-profits were reduced following the implementation of SFAS 132R.