Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have increased rapidly in emerging and developing countries, creating both opportunities and fiscal challenges. One of the main challenges is that while governments have increased commitments in guarantees and direct subsidies to promote PPPs, contractual...

The First Millennium Development Goal (MDG#1) is to cut the fraction of global population living on less than one dollar per day in half, by 2015. Foreign aid financed investments may contribute to the attainment of this goal. But how much can aid be reasonably expected to accomplish? A...

This study explores whether IMF-supported programs in low-income countries (LICs) catalyze Official Development Assistance (ODA). Based on a comprehensive set of ODA measures and using Propensity Score Matching approach to address selection bias, we show that programs addressing policy or...

This paper brings the aid effectiveness debate to the sub-national level. We hypothesize the non-robust results regarding the effects of aid on development in the previous literature to arise due to the effects of aid being insufficiently large to measurably affect aggregate outcomes. Using...

We examine the cyclical properties of development aid using bilateral data for 22 donors and over 100 recipients during 1970‒2005. We find that bilateral aid flows are on average pro-cyclical with respect to business cycles in donor and recipient countries. However, they become...

This paper shows that donors that maximize relative aid impact spread their budgets across many recipient countries in a unique Nash equilibrium, explaining aid fragmentation. This equilibrium may be inefficient even without fixed costs, and the inefficiency increases in the equality of donors'...

This paper contributes to the literature by introducing the role of geographic concentration of the source of remittances. Specifically, using data over 2010-2015 for 72 developing countries, we study the impact of (i) large remittances and (ii) the geographic concentration of the source of...

Using a database of up to 62 variables for 196 countries over 57 years, a hyperinflation cycle has been characterized to propose a broader setting of stylized facts. Beyond the usual facts, the findings in this paper contribute to the literature of modern hyperinflations in that these cycles...

We develop an empirical model to predict banking crises in a sample of 60 low-incomecountries (LICs) over the 1981-2015 period. Given the recent emergence of financial sectorstress associated with low commodity prices in several LICs, we assign price movements inprimary commodities a key role in...