What factors are associated with changes in nonprofit receipts?

Non-profit organizations play a key role in providing services to a broad section of society. Nonprofit organizations include, but are not limited to, hospitals, foundations, arts organizations, political action groups, child care and adult education programs. U.S. gross receipts of non-profit organizations totaled $2,266 billion in November 2005, or 18 percent of GDP. In this analysis county-level data is used to assess what factors are associated with changes in the receipts of non-profit organizations. Each county is treated as an individual unit. U.S. county data for gross receipts of non-profit organizations was collected and characteristics that may affect receipts, such as population and population density, income, poverty rate, unemployment rate, median age and other variables were used to help explain changes in counties. The analysis included a data set of counties from 47 states and a subset of the data with the 303 counties in the Ninth Federal Reserve District.