We develop a screening model to analyse the funding allocation criteria of institutional donors towards NGOs. The model shows that when donors care about efficiency, they screen NGOs and concentrate their funding on those that comply. Combining two waves, 2002 and 2008, of a unique survey data...

NGO aid is still widely believed to be superior to official aid (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of NGO aid by performing panel Tobit estimations for...

On the basis of a single-period, guns-versus-butter, complete-information model in which two agents dispute control over an insecure portion of their combined output, we study the choice between a peace agreement that maintains the status quo without arming (or unarmed peace) and open conflict...

We consider a dynamic setting in which two sovereign states with overlapping ownership claims on a resource/asset first arm and then choose whether to resolve their dispute violently through war or peacefully through settlement. Both approaches depend on the states' military capacities, but...

We consider a dynamic setting where two countries with competing claims to a resource/asset first arm and then choose whether to resolve their dispute through war or peacefully through settlement. War precludes international trade and can be destructive, but also locks gains and eliminates...

This paper proposes a simple framework to better understand an opposition group's choice between peace, terrorism, and open civil conflict against the government. Our model implies that terrorism emerges if constraints on the ruling executive group are intermediate and rents are sizeable, hereas...

This paper studies the effects of bilateral foreign aid on conflict escalation and de-escalation. We make three major contributions. First, we combine data on civil wars with data on low level conflicts in a new ordinal measure capturing the two-sided and multifaceted nature of conflict. Second,...

China's development model challenges the approaches of traditional Western donors like the World Bank. We argue that both aim at stability, but differ in the norms propagated to achieve that. Using fixed effects and IV estimations, we analyze a broad range of subnational stability measures in...

We analyze how trade openness matters for interstate conflict over productive resources. Our analysis features a terms-of-trade channel that makes security policies trade-regime dependent. Specifically, trade between two adversaries reduces each one's incentive to arm given the opponent's...