This paper explores how U.S. bilateral economic aid has changed over time, focusing on how the recent era-in which the War on Terror has played a prominent role in the Bush administration's aid policy-differs from previous eras. In particular, has the renewed geopolitical role of aid coincided...

Using a novel application of stochastic frontier analysis to overcome data limitations, this paper finds substantially shorter project preparation periods for World Bank loans to countries that are geopolitically important (especially to the U.S.). Accelerated preparation is one explanation for...

Traditional aid conditionality has been attacked as ineffective in part because aid agencies - notably the World Bank - often fail to enforce conditions. This pattern undermines the credibility of conditionality, weakening incentives to implement policy reforms. The standard critique attributes...