THE GOODS PRODUCED BY NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS

Nonprofit organizations produce a range of goods and services from the purely public to the purely private. Within the two extremes fall a m ajority of their outputs. This article explores the question of what d etermines a nonprofit's mix of goods. It first develops a method to me asure the product mir of charitable nonprofit organizations. A testabl e model is then offered and applied to a national database consisting of tax returns filed with Internal Revenue Service by tax-exempt chari table nonprofits. The results indicate that the output mix can be expl ained by institutional characteristics, types of activity, and communi ty-based factors. The article concludes with a discussion of whether, given the evidence, public subsidies to charitable nonprofits should b e based on the outputs these entities produce.