Traditional aid conditionality has been attacked as ineffective in part because aid agencies--notably the World Bank--often fail to enforce conditions. This pattern undermines the credibility of conditionality, weakening incentives to implement policy reforms. The standard critique attributed...

Poole and Rosenthal (1997) argue that most congressional voting can be understood in terms of a low-dimensional spatial model. This paper uses their model to assess the importance of the two mechanisms that could contribute to the vote-predicting power of constituency variables: (i) constituency...

To achieve humanitarian objectives, international development assistance must be structured to insure its effectiveness. The resulting conditionality, however, raises sovereignty concerns as attempts to promote effectiveness may conflict with respect for recipient state sovereignty and...

In recent decades, one of the objectives of international development assistance has been to encourage developing country governments to reorient their economies from highly regulated and centrally controlled to deregulated and market-based. However, poor economic performance on its own might...

This paper develops a model to test whether World Bank lending caters to U.S. interests. We use country-level panel data to examine the geographic distribution of World Bank lending to 110 countries from 1968 to 2002. After controlling for country characteristics expected to influence the...

One of the policy reforms promoted by the World Bank in recent decades is to reduce the often burdensome level of regulation by developing country governments and thus promote a reorientation from highly regulated and centrally controlled to deregulated and market-based economies. Indeed, poor...

This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years, as...

This paper examines the role of U.S. domestic politics in the allocation of foreign aid using panel data on aid to 119 countries from 1960 to 1997. Employing proxies for four aid allocation criteria (development concerns, strategic importance, commercial importance, and the degree of...

This paper explores the relevance of the principal-agent model for analyzing development projects using data from World Bank-funded projects. After demonstrating that World Bank loan agreements can be viewed as principal-agent contracts, the paper explores the importance of the agency problem in...

This paper explores the influence of Japan and the United States over the geographic distribution of Asian Development Bank (ADB) funds. Although nominally an independent, multilateral organization, the ADB is widely regarded as bowing to the interests of its two most influential donors....