The loans of the IMF, World Bank, and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) are excluded from debt restructuring. This is the result of their preferred creditor status. There are two justifications for the preferred creditor status of MDBs: (a) they give concessional loans, and (b) they...

This paper addresses an apparent lack of economic theory in the analysis of multilateral development bank (MDB) behavior. A simple comparative statics model that is adapted from the credit union literature is used to predict potential areas of conflict, agreement, and indifference between MDB...

This paper adopts a flexible framework to assess both short- and long-run business cycle linkages between six Latin American (LA) countries and the four largest economies in the world (namely the US, the Euro area, Japan and China) over the period 1980:I-2011:IV. The result indicate that within...

Average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. We document this fact for thirteen countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia). We develop a measure of human capital that accounts for the selection of workers with different unobserved...

We use a range of methods and remittance data from 1990 to 2007 to assess the strength and significance of linkages between remittance flows to Latin America and the U.S. business cycle. All of the evidence suggests that remittance flows are relatively insensitive to fluctuations in the U.S....

Motivated by recent bursts of global financial market turbulence, this paper investigates the linkages between the financial markets in the United States and those of the seven largest Latin American economies, focusing on the impact of shocks originating in the U.S. stock, bond, and currency...

This paper quantifies the economic impact of changes in U.S. monetary policy on emerging market countries. We explore empirically how country risk, as proxied by sovereign bond spreads, is influenced by U.S. monetary policy, country-specific fundamentals, and conditions in global capital...

Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, implementation, and completion dates of Chinese development projects. We use data from the Gallup World Poll for 126 countries over...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...