This paper shows that the increased policy-selectivity of aid allocations observed in recent years provides recipient countries an incentive to improve policies. The paper estimates that a change in the World Banks Country Policy and Institutional Assessment policy index from 1.5 to 2 for a...

We present a new mechanism to explain politically induced changes in bilateral aid. We argue that shifts in the foreign policy alignment between a donor and a recipient country arising from leadership changes induce reallocation of development aid. Utilizing data from the G7 and 133 developing...

Since the introduction of the HIPC Initiative in the early 2000s, indebted LICs had to show a decent governance performance before their debts were forgiven. We discuss the hypothesis that during the follow-up, Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), the World Bank has refrained from this...