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...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

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...

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 show how major shareholders can exploit their power over international organizations to hide their foreign-policy interventions from domestic audiences. We argue that major powers exert influence bilaterally when domestic audiences view the intervention favorably. When domestic audiences are...

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...

This article investigates whether China's foreign aid is particularly prone to political capture by political leaders of aid-receiving countries. Specifically, we examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders' birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group to...

We review the aid effectiveness literature to assess whether foreign aid given to areas of limited statehood can be expected to promote economic and social outcomes in the recipient country. We distinguish different types of aid, motives for granting it, recipient country policies and...

Economists typically evaluate policies based on how such policies affect individuals' utilities. We follow this approach by taking a welfarist view of the USA's espoused policy of promoting liberty in other parts of the world. However, we take a nuanced view by investigating the type of welfare...

International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate global poverty. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for individuals and governments who care about world...