Political misalignment and greater ideological distance between donor and recipient governments may render foreign aid less effective by adding to transaction costs and eroding trust. In addition, development aid from the West may lead to adverse growth effects in the global South due to the...

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...

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...

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...

There are arguably few topics in current global economic policy as intensely debated as the impact of different facets of globalization on human development. Given that the concept of globalization reflects a multitude of economic and societal transformations, the scope of these discussions...

We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of bilateral foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country’s probability of receiving aid. The results show that...

"We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are...

The typical identification strategy in aid effectiveness studies assumes donor motives do not influence the impact of aid on growth. We call this homogeneity assumption into question, first constructing a model in which donor motives matter and then testing the assumption empirically. -- Aid ;...