We investigate whether and to what extent Chinese development finance affects infant mortality, combining 92 demographic and health surveys (DHS) for a maximum of 53 countries and almost 55,000 sub-national locations over the 2002-2014 period. We address causality by instrumenting aid with a set...

This chapter discusses the role of military interventionism and aid in nation-building. We argue that (1) intervention strategies of foreign actors like the United States often unfavorably interact with local institutional settings, which (2) produces undesired outcomes not only for the target...

This paper provides new evidence on the stochastic behaviour of the EPU (Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index constructed by Baker et al. (2016) in six of the biggest economies (Canada, France, Japan, US, Ireland, and Sweden) over the period from January 1985 to October 2019. In particular,...

The paper reviews recent literature on the economics of migration and diasporas, focusing on economic gains and opportunities that these diasporas could represent for home countries. In addition, the paper discusses policies aimed at leveraging this "diaspora capital"

We generalise the traditional development-accounting framework to an open-economy setting. In addition to factor endowments and productivity, relative factor costs emerge as a source of real-income variation across countries. These are shaped by bilateral trade determinants (which underpin the...

This paper focuses on the analysis of the long-run response of the Real Exchange Rate (RER) to political risks and tests whether non-economic variables have an impact on RER in 31 emerging and developing countries. We use annual data from the International Country Risk Guide database over the...

IMF programs are often considered to carry a “stigma” that triggers adverse market reactions. We show that such a negative IMF effect disappears when accounting for endogenous selection into programs. To proxy for a country's access to financial markets, we use credit ratings and investor...

Should the European Union grant state aid through an institution like the European Investment bank? This paper evaluates the efficiency of different measures for granting state aid. We use a theoretical model with firms that differ in their creditworthiness and compare different types of...