Mark J. Cowan (Boise State University, College of Business and Economics) has posted Taxing and Regulating College and University Endowment Income: The Literature’s Perspective on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

College and university endowments have reported outstanding investment returns in recent years. While annual investment returns have averaged around 15.2%, colleges and universities have only been spending about 4.6% of their endowment assets each year. This has drawn the attention of the Senate Committee on Finance, which recently held a hearing regarding the accumulation of endowment income at colleges and universities and debated whether endowments should be taxed or regulated (for example, by the use of the minimum distribution requirement that applies to private foundations). This Article marshals and fuses the existing literature on endowments, the rationales for tax exemptions, the justifications for the unrelated business income tax, and the reasoning behind the private foundation minimum distribution requirements to determine whether a tax on endowment income or a minimum distribution requirement would be consistent with our current understanding of how colleges and universities should be taxed. The Article concludes that the existing literature would not justify taxing or regulating endowment accumulation and that any attempt to tax or regulate endowments should only be undertaken in light of a fundamental re-imagining of our tax exempt system.