borrowings must be issued through a government conduit (usually a public authority), and
also because the cost savings are only realizable if a large amount of money is borrowed.
30
In addition to tax-exempt borrowing, nonprofits may also use mortgages or notes to
finance capital expenditures. Bowman
31
also points out that nonprofits often acquire capital
assets with short-term debt; hence, capital financing may not even include bonds, mortgages,
or notes at all and may include such mundane sources of borrowing as “accounts payable.”
32
Another complicating consideration of nonprofit capital structure, then, is the manner in
which nonprofits might choose to finance capital—through conventional financial debt
instruments or through other (nonfinancial) liability accounts. This indicates that how
capital structure is defined is an important consideration in any empirical analysis.
LIMITATIONS OF EXISTING LITERATURE
Much of the existing literature on nonprofit borrowing has focused on hospitals exclu-
sively.
33
While these analysis are theoretically important for identifying motivational differ-
ences between nonprofits and for-profit fir ms, hospitals are unrepresentative of the sector
as a whole in several important ways: they are larger in general (the average total assets
for hospitals in the current sample, e.g., are nearly $56 million compared to $14.2 million
for all nonprofits), derive more of their revenue from programs and investments than other
nonprofits on average (on average, nearly 60 percent of hospital revenues are derived from
these sources, compared to less than 30 percent for nonprofits in general) have more stable
revenues which makes securing debt easier,
34
and better accounting systems than other
30. Bowman, “Uniqueness of Nonprofit Finance,” 297.
31. Bowman, “Uniqueness of Nonprofit Finance,” 303.
32. For example, a nonprofit might acquire a computer (capital) from a retail store and purchase it
on credit (accounts payable). Hence, capital assets are acquired with no long-term debt instrument. An
empirical explanation is also possible. The inverse of Total Liabilities/Total Assets is Total Equity/Total
Assets. In Ivo Welch, “A Bad Measure of Leverage: The Financial Debt-to-Asset Ratio,” (2010) available
from: http://ssrn.com/abstract=931675: accessed 17 December 2010. SSRN-id931675.pdf, Welch points out
that regressing Total Equity (Net Assets)/Total Assets on Financial Debt/Total Assets will indicate the extent
that organizations substitute nonfinancial debt for financial debt. A coefficient near 1 with an R
2
close to 1
would indicate no such substitution occurs on average, because the variation is wholly explained by financial
debt. For the final sample in this paper, such an analysis produces a coefficient of −0.9 and an R
2
of only 0.31.
Nonfinancial debt does seem to substitute for financial debt in the nonprofit sector, as Bowman suggests.
33. Gerard J. Wedig, Frank A. Sloan, Mahmud Hassan, and M ichael A. Morrisey, “Capital Structure,
Ownership, and Capital Payment Policy: The Case of Hospitals,” The Journal of Finance 43, no. 1 (1988):
21–40; Peter W. Bacon, “Do Capital Structure Theories Apply to Nonprofit Hospitals,” Journal of the Midwest
Finance Association (1992): 86–90; Gerard J. Wedig, Mahmud Hassan, and Michael A. Morrisey, “Tax-Exempt
Debt and the Capital Structure of Nonprofit Organizations: An Application to Hospitals,” The Journal of
Finance 51, no. 4 (1996): 1247–1283; William M. Gentry, “Debt, Investment, and Endowment Accumulation:
the Case of Not-for-Profit Hospitals,” Journal of Health Economics 21 (2002): 845–872.
34. Yan et al., 51.
Calabrese / Nonprofit Capital Structure 127