We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...

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...

Using data from 1988 to 2007, we examine to what extent bilateral aid flows of an individual donor to a country depend on aid flows from all other bilateral and multilateral donors to that country. We thereby want to assess to what extent donor coordination, free-riding, selectivity,...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

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...

International humanitarian aid is pivotal in the response to natural disasters suffered by low-and middle-income countries. While its allocation has been shown to be influenced by donors' foreign policy considerations, power relations within recipient countries have not been addressed. This...

This article analyzes whether foreign aid affects the net flows of refugees from recipient countries. Combining refugee data on 141 origin countries over the 1976-2013 period with bilateral Official Development Assistance data, we estimate the causal effects of a country’s aid receipts on both...