Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing sovereign ratings that do not accurately reflect the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political...

Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing sovereign ratings that do not accurately reflect the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political...

Does economic freedom increase the utility of an average citizen? Public choice theory in particular has emphasized the shortcomings of governments and voting processes, and the advantages of relying on markets and individual decision making. However, an increasing amount of people are refusing...

We derive new tests for proper calibration of multivariate density forecasts based on Rosenblatt probability integral transforms. These tests have the advantage that they i) do not depend on the ordering of variables in the forecasting model, ii) are applicable to densities of arbitrary...

We analyse whether there is a relationship between EU Commissioners’ national origin and political outcomes. For this purpose, we argue that examining the Commissioner for Agriculture allows the most precise empirical identification: there is a specific budget for agriculture which accounts...

We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Specifically, we test whether the effect of aid on economic growth is reduced by the share of years a country has served on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the period the aid has...

We provide new evidence about the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict. To do so, we combine temporal variation in international drug prices with new data on spatial variation in opium suitability to examine the effect of opium profitability on conflict in Afghanistan....

It is puzzling that India, which has a large domestic constituency of people suffering from underdevelopment, chronic poverty and mal-governance, is emerging as an important aid donor. With the intension of understanding why poor countries provide foreign aid, this article is the first to...

Over 300 government members have had the main responsibility for international development cooperation in 23 member countries of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee since the organization started reporting detailed Official Development Assistance (ODA) data in 1967. Understanding their...

China’s development finance is sizable but reliable information is scarce. To address critical information gaps, we introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000-2011....