Cheng Authors New Paper on Nonprofit Funding for Parks
June 20, 2022

A new paper by Assistant Professor Yuan (Daniel) Cheng, "Government‐nonprofit partnerships outside the contracting relationship and public funding allocation: Evidence from New York City's park system," has been published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership. 

Government-nonprofit partnerships outside the contracting relationship have become an increasingly important mechanism in financing and supporting public service provision. However, the relationship between these partnerships and public funding allocation remains unclear.

This paper articulates two competing mechanisms—the substitution mechanism and the exchange mechanism—and tests them with a unique geocoded dataset of public park capital projects allocation in New York City.

The findings indicate that parks units supported by government-nonprofit partnerships are likely to receive more public capital project funding, which supports the exchange mechanism. In addition, larger parks with a more populous community surrounding them get more public capital funding allocation.