The typical identification strategy in aid effectiveness studies assumes donor motives do not influence the impact of aid on growth. We call this homogeneity assumption into question, first constructing a model in which donor motives matter and then testing the assumption empirically.

International donors usually have particular goals they want to achieve with their foreign aid, for example, poverty alleviation. In the international aid story lobbying by potential recipient groups attempting to capture the donor's support play a potentially important role for nongovernmental...

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...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to their husbands) benefits children. Does this observation imply that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? We develop a series of noncooperative family bargaining models to understand what kind of...

Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income and unemployment rates. A growing class of place based policies attempt to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities or regions. Place...

In this paper we incorporate a labor market with matching frictions and wage rigidities into the New Keynesian business cycle model. In particular, we analyze the effect of a monetary policy shock and investigate how labor market frictions affect the transmission process of monetary policy. The...

The need to evaluate the performance of active labour market policies is not questioned any longer. Even though OECD countries spend significant shares of national resources on these measures, unemployment rates remain high or even increase. We focus on microeconometric evaluation which has to...

Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts (UISAs) entitle workers to unemployment benefits at the expense of future pension payments. Therefore, such accounts make unemployment less attractive, intensify job search, and raise employment. In the present paper the wage and employment consequences of...

In this article we propose and implement an instrumental variable estimation procedure to obtain treatment effects on duration outcomes. The method can handle the typical complications that arise with duration data of time-varying treatment and censoring. The treatment effect we define is in...

In this paper we develop a dynamic structural life-cycle model of labor supply behavior which fully accounts for the effect of income tax and transfers on labor supply incentives. Additionally, the model recognizes the demand side driven rationing risk that might prevent individuals from...