Do grants to charities crowd out other income? Evidence from the UK

We use a novel identification strategy to shed light on the effect of grant funding. We focus on charities that applied to a UK lottery grant programme. Where charities score the same on formal criteria, it is likely that informal criteria orthogonal to quality are used to break the ties, allowing us plausibly to treat a grant as a random event. We find evidence that grants have a positive impact for smaller charities, increasing their longevity and even crowding in other income.