 Philanthropic Cause PrioritizationEmily Oehlsen Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2024, vol. 38, issue 2, 63-82 Abstract: Many foundations decide how much and where to give based on their founders' personal precommitments to specific issues, geographies, and/or institutions. If a grantmaking organization instead wanted to select problems based on a general measure of impact per dollar spent, how should it approach this goal? What tools could it use to identify promising cause areas (climate change, education, or health, for example) or to compare grants that achieve different results? This paper focuses on an approach followed by the grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy for its "Global Health and Wellbeing" portfolio, with an emphasis on two key frameworks: equalizing marginal philanthropic returns, as well as importance, neglectedness, and tractability. It describes measurement and comparability under the first framework, and then applies the second framework to the example of reducing exposure to lead. It concludes by considering critiques and areas for improvement. JEL-codes: I10 L31 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:jecper:v:38:y:2024:i:2:p:63-82 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1257/jep.38.2.63 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Perspectives is currently edited by Enrico Moretti More articles in Journal of Economic Perspectives from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC. |
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