The World Bank, under the stewardship of the United States, stands out as the global leader among international development organizations. Does China's establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) undermine this status? Examining this question, we focus on the borrowing practices of a special set of countries: the founding members of the AIIB. These founders openly defied the public preference of the United States, arguably to create a potential rival to the World Bank. Using a new causal inference method, Pang, Liu, and Xu's Dynamic Multilevel Latent Factor Model—as well as several well-known estimation models as robustness checks—we document at least a temporary decrease in the number of World Bank infrastructure projects that the developing AIIB founders have entered into. This study presents the first systematic evidence that China's AIIB could unsettle the political influence the United States has enjoyed over developing countries through its leadership of the World Bank. An important set of countries may be parting ways with the World Bank and looking to a Chinese institution for leadership in the world of development.

There is widespread concern that government funding bureaucratizes nonprofits and causes them to be administratively inefficient. This study brings together contrasting streams of literature and hypothesizes a curvilinear relationship between government funding and nonprofits’ administrative efficiency. Using a longitudinal dataset of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-registered nonprofits, we find evidence for this nonlinear effect. In particular, as the proportion of a nonprofit’s government funding increases, its reported administrative expense ratio will initially increase, but after the proportion reaches one third to two thirds of total revenue (depending on the estimation strategy used), further increases in government funding reduce the reported administrative expense ratio. Nonprofits may maintain a favorable level of operating efficiency with either a low level or a high level of dependence on government funding. Our work adds to the literature on government–nonprofit funding relationship and offers practical implications for nonprofit management.