We investigate the impact of health aid on infant mortality conditional on the quality of governance in 96 recipient countries. Our analysis applies the long difference estimator and instrumental variable estimation, with aid instrumented by donor government fractionalization interacted with the...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently economic performance. But if the quality of leadership matters, then understanding what motivates individuals to become politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central...

This paper examines the impact on TFP in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and in other developing countries (DEV) of trade-related foreign R&D (NRD), education and governance. The measures of NRD are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South trade patterns, and...

This paper tests the hypothesis that international migration experiences may promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability. In order to examine this question, we use a simple postcard voting experiment designed to capture the population's desire for...

Microcredit is an innovative financial tool designed to reduce poverty and fix credit market imperfections. We use experimental measures of time discounting and risk aversion for villagers in south India to highlight behavioral features of microcredit. Conditional on borrowing from any source,...

In a recent randomized experiment we found mean returns to capital of between 5 and 6 percent per month in Sri Lankan microenterprises, much higher than market interest rates. But returns were found to be much higher among men than among women, and indeed were not different from zero for women....

Between 1993 and 1994, extremist militia groups carried out the extermination of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the genocides of Burundi and Rwanda. Nearly one million people were killed and thousands were forcibly uprooted from their homes. Over the course of a few months, Kagera - a...