The recent global financial crisis placed new economic and fiscal pressures on donor countries that may have long-term effects on their ability and willingness to provide aid. Not only did donor-country incomes fall, but the cause of the drop — the banking and financial-sector crisis — may...

The aim of this paper is to determine the drivers of a donor's decision on the composition of aid. We apply a dataset on international post-disaster assistance between 2000 and 2007 that includes information on the channel (bilateral vs. multilateral) and type (cash vs. in-kind) of each aid...

Measurement issues are one of the most important reasons for the highly contrasting findings in the literature on the effects of structural reforms on growth. This paper puts forward improved measures of economic liberalization across countries and over time, focusing on the unique experience of...

Foreign aid flows have increased considerably during the last decades, targeting, apart from development objectives, goals related to democracy. In this paper we investigate whether aid has affected the political regime of recipient countries. To this end, we use annual data on Net Official...

We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we test if aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. We find that positive regime changes and...

There are both empirical and theoretical arguments for the thesis that foreign factors have an impact on domestic institutional quality. Yet the literature is divided over whether exposure (openness to the world economy) or the kind of institutions in surrounding countries (relative location)...

When it comes to international economic sanctions, the most frequent goal is regime change and democratization. Yet, past experiences suggest that such sanctions are often ineffective; moreover, quite paradoxically, targeted regimes tend to respond with policies that amplify the sanctions'...

We study how corruption affects economic activities of households in rural Liberia. A proxy of corruption of community leaders is obtained by directly monitoring the diversion of inputs associated with a development project. We measure quantities of these inputs twice; before and after the chief...

Using a panel of up to 116 countries from 1970 to 2010 we estimate the effects of foreign aid flows on a variety of measures of institutional quality. We find that aid flows are associated with the deterioration of both political and economic institutions. Regarding the latter, aid flows are...

The paper studies the role of social capital in the urban informal sector in Bolivia. It shows that a formal firm has about 6.4 times the sales of an informal firm with no social capital, but informal firms use their social capital to compensate for the lack of formal productivity benefits. By...