The robustness of Kingma’s crowd-out estimate: Evidence from new data on contributions to public radio

We revisit Kingma’s (Kingma (1989). Journal of Political Economy, 97, 1197–1207) widely cited study of charitable contributions to public radio. Kingma’s estimate of partial, but statistically significant crowd-out remains a benchmark in the literature because he was able to match household-level contributions data with station-level data on revenue, including revenue from government grants. To the best of our knowledge, no comparable data have become available until now. We replicate Kingma’s estimates with the original data and then apply the same methodology to very similar data from 1996. Kingma’s estimates are not robust to the use of the newer data.