We assess the determinants of private donations across a large sample of US based NGOs with foreign aid activities. Our results show that donations do not depend in the expected way on publicly available information on NGO characteristics that reveal an efficient and targeted use of funds,...

We assess whether bilateral and multilateral donors of foreign aid specialized and coordinated their activities with other donors as agreed in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We account for donor heterogeneity, varying aid priorities and recipient characteristics in order to isolate changes in...

Aid by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is still widely believed to be superior to official development assistance (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

The accountability of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has various dimensions. From an economic perspective, official financiers, private donors as well as aid recipients could expect more charitable output from NGOs, if less efficient organizations were squeezed out of international...

We assess empirically whether foreign official development assistance (ODA) has been effective in alleviating HIV/AIDS epidemics, which figures prominently among the Millennium Development Goals. We employ a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach to identify the treatment effect of ODA...

type="main" <title type="main">SUMMARY</title> <p>The regional allocation of aid within recipient countries has been largely ignored. We use geocoded data on the location of aid projects financed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank within a sample of 27 recipient countries to assess the claim of donors that...</p>

We empirically analyze how other aid agencies, within and outside the United States, reacted to the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). We find that positive signaling effects dominate possible substitution effects. Striving for MCC eligibility thus pays.