A windfall of natural resource revenue (or foreign aid) faces government with choices of how to manage public debt, investment, and the distribution of funds for consumption, particularly if the windfall is both anticipated and temporary.  Standard policy advice follows the permanent income...

The impact of class size on student achievement remains a thorny question for educational decision makers.  Meta-analyses of empirical studies emphasise the absence of class-size efects but detractors have argued against such pessimistic conclusions because many of the underlying studies have...

This paper tests the theoretically founded hypothesis that the surge of SWF establishments is determined by three main factors: 1) the existence of natural resources profits, 2) the government structure and 3) the ability to invest usefully in the domestic economy.  We test this hypothesis on a...

Donors who try to impose policy conditionality on countries receiving their aid commonly face confflicting incentives between using aid to induce income-increasing reforms and using aid to assist low-income countries: this confflict can lead to a time-consistency problem. This paper o¤ers a...

This paper draws further attention to the importance of taking into account off-budget aid when estimating the degree of foreign aid fungibility.  It does so by re-evaluating the results of a recent, influential paper which concluded that health aid is fully fungible in the long run.  Allowing...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries.  Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem...