In 2014 over $60 billion was mobilized to help developing nations mitigate climate change, an amount equivalent to the GDP of Kenya. Interestingly, breaking from the traditional model of bilateral aid, donor countries distributed nearly fifty percent of their aid through multilateral aid funds...

As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

The bulk of International Finance Corporation (IFC) lending benefits companies from rich countries, and projects in countries with middle income. Large conglomerates such as Lidl or Mövenpick have been among its direct beneficiaries. This contrasts to some extent with the IFC's official...

What are the dynamic consequences of comprehensive integration shocks? The answer to this question appears all but trivial. We set up a dynamic macroeconomic model of a small open economy where both capital and labor are mobile and there are increasing returns to scale at the aggregate level....

This paper reviews the economics approach to conflict and national borders. The paper (a) provides a summary of ideas and concepts from the economics literature on the size of nations; (b) illustrates them within a simple analytical framework where populations fight over borders and resources,...

This paper analyzes the link between the fact that fully endogenous growth models exhibit (or not) the non-desirable scale effects property and assumptions regarding the intensity of knowledge diffusion. In that respect, we extend a standard Schumpeterian growth model by introducing explicitly...

We study contestability in non-profit markets when non-commercial providers supply a homogeneous collective good through increasing-returns-to-scale technologies. Unlike in the case of for-profit competition, in the non-profit case the absence of price-based sales contracts means that fixed...

Iceberg transport costs are one of the main ingredients of modern trade and economic geography models: transport costs are modelled by assuming that a fraction of the goods shipped “melts in transit”. In this paper, we investigate whether the iceberg assumption applies to the costs of...

In this paper, we explore the role of trade in differentiated final goods as well offshoring of tasks for inequality both within and between countries. We emphasize the distinction between managerial and production labor. Production labor is assumed to be a variable input composed of tradable...

R&D-based growth theory suggests that a larger population size raises either the long-run rate of economic growth ("strong scale effect") or the level of per capita income ("weak scale effect"), with far-reaching policy implications. However, for modern times there is little empirical support...