We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country's probability of receiving aid. The results show that fractionalization...

We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Donor countries ́political motives might reduce the effectiveness of conditionality, channel aid to inferior projects or affect the way aid is spent in other ways, reduce the aid bureaucracyś...

This paper confirms recent evidence of a positive impact of aid on growth and widens the scope of evaluation to a range of outcomes including proximate sources of growth (e.g., physical and human capital), indicators of social welfare (e.g., poverty and infant mortality), and measures of...

This working paper has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project 'Foreign Aid': Research and This paper confronts three conundrums. First, does the relationship between aid and growth fade over time when aid is successful? Second, why are aid inflows neglected in the literature on growth...

We investigate how protectionist policies influence economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was overturned by a protectionist majority in 1887. We employ the...

This paper develops a two-country, dynamic general equilibrium model with innovation contests to study the impact of globalization on the skill premium and fully-endogenous growth. Higher quality products are endogenously discovered through stochastic and sequential global innovation contests in...

We build and estimate a structural dynamic general equilibrium model of growth and trade. Trade affects growth through changes in consumer and producer prices that in turn stimulate or impede physical capital accumulation. At the same time, growth affects trade, directly through changes in...

We undertake a trade-growth accounting exercise by decomposing data on changes in bilateral international trade flows into their direct (endowment accumulation, productivity growth, changes in trade costs, changing preferences) and indirect components (general equilibrium effects). Furthermore,...

China's increased trade with and investment in Africa have boosted the continent's economic growth but have also generated considerable controversy. In this paper we investigate China's outward direct investment ODI in Africa using macro and micro data. The aggregate data on China's ODI in...