Jennifer M. Walsh

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I am a Ph.D. student in Business Economics at Harvard, where I am supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

My research studies how firms interact with external stakeholders, using tools from industrial organization, corporate finance, and public economics.

I graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in Physics & Mathematics. Before starting my Ph.D., I was a management consultant at Bain & Company and a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research for Professor Claudia Goldin. Before economics, I did research in computational biology.

Working Papers

  1. How do nonprofits use cash windfalls? Evidence from $5B in unrestricted donations. [SSRN]

    How do nonprofits use unrestricted gifts? Donations to 501(c)(3)’s are increasingly given unrestricted due to concerns that restrictions on use unduly constrain nonprofits. I study the effect of such funding on recipients using a $5B sample of MacKenzie Scott’s gifts from 2019-2022 to 567 nonprofits. I find that, within two years of receiving the gift, nonprofits received 64% of the average gift in additional contributions and spent the entirety of the average gift compared to similar untreated nonprofits. After giving away 26% as grants to individuals and other nonprofits, recipients spent these funds proportionally to their previous activities. Two years after the gift, CEO compensation increased by $20.9K (9%), average director compensation increased by $12K (12.1%), and average compensation of non-senior employees increased by $2.7K (5.8%) compared to similar untreated nonprofits. For every dollar of unrestricted gift and additional contributions, the present value of executive compensation increased by $0.23. Recipient nonprofits do not become less constrained in allocating their revenue to indirect costs or savings. In sum, nonprofits that receive this set of unrestricted gifts do not behave in the hypothesized liquidity-constrained manner.

  2. Margin or Mission? The Effects of CEOs on Hospital Outcomes.
    with Nagisa Tadjfar

Publications

  1. HiNT: a computational method for detecting copy number variations and translocations from Hi-C data.
    with Su Wang, Soohyun Lee, Chong Chu, Dhawal Jain, Peter Kerpedjiev, Geoffrey M. Nelson, Burak H. Alver & Peter J. Park
    Genome Biology, 2020
  2. High-resolution spectroscopic study of extremely metal-poor star candidates from the SkyMapper survey.
    with Heather R. Jacobson, Anna Frebel, José M. Peña, Qinsi Yu, Stefan Keller, Martin Asplund, Michael S. Bessell, Gary S. Da Costa, Anna F. Marino, John E. Norris, Brian P. Schmidt, Patrick Tisserand, David Yong, Andrew R. Casey, and Karin Lind
    The Astrophysical Journal, 2015
  3. Widespread Macromolecular Interaction Perturbations in Human Genetic Disorders.
    with Nidhi Sahni, Song Yi, Mikko Taipale, Juan I Fuxman Bass, Jasmin Coulombe-Huntington, Fan Yang, Jian Peng, Jochen Weile, Georgios I Karras, Yang Wang, István A Kovács, Atanas Kamburov, Irina Krykbaeva, Mandy H Lam, George Tucker, Vikram Khurana, Amitabh Sharma, Yang-Yu Liu, Nozomu Yachie, Quan Zhong, Yun Shen, Alexandre Palagi, Adriana San-Miguel, Changyu Fan, Dawit Balcha, Amelie Dricot, Daniel M Jordan, Akash A Shah, Xinping Yang, Ani K Stoyanova, Alex Leighton, Michael A Calderwood, Yves Jacob, Michael E Cusick, Kourosh Salehi-Ashtiani, Luke J Whitesell, Shamil Sunyaev, Bonnie Berger, Albert-László Barabási, Benoit Charloteaux, David E Hill, Tong Hao, Frederick P Roth, Yu Xia, Albertha JM Walhout, Susan Lindquist, Marc Vidal
    Cell, 2014
  4. A Proteome-Scale Map of the Human Interactome Network.
    with Thomas Rolland, Murat Taşan, Benoit Charloteaux, Samuel J Pevzner, Quan Zhong, Nidhi Sahni, Song Yi, Irma Lemmens, Celia Fontanillo, Roberto Mosca, Atanas Kamburov, Susan D Ghiassian, Xinping Yang, Lila Ghamsari, Dawit Balcha, Bridget E Begg, Pascal Braun, Marc Brehme, Martin P Broly, Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis, Dan Convery-Zupan, Roser Corominas, Jasmin Coulombe-Huntington, Elizabeth Dann, Matija Dreze, Amélie Dricot, Changyu Fan, Eric Franzosa, Fana Gebreab, Bryan J Gutierrez, Madeleine F Hardy, Mike Jin, Shuli Kang, Ruth Kiros, Guan Ning Lin, Katja Luck, Andrew MacWilliams, Jörg Menche, Ryan R Murray, Alexandre Palagi, Matthew M Poulin, Xavier Rambout, John Rasla, Patrick Reichert, Viviana Romero, Elien Ruyssinck, Julie M Sahalie, Annemarie Scholz, Akash A Shah, Amitabh Sharma, Yun Shen, Kerstin Spirohn, Stanley Tam, Alexander O Tejeda, Shelly A Wanamaker, Jean-Claude Twizere, Kerwin Vega, Michael E Cusick, Yu Xia, Albert-László Barabási, Lilia M Iakoucheva, Patrick Aloy, Javier De Las Rivas, Jan Tavernier, Michael A Calderwood, David E Hill, Tong Hao, Frederick P Roth, Marc Vidal
    Cell, 2014