It continues to be heavily disputed whether foreign aid promotes economic growth in developing countries. In most cross-country regressions, aid is considered effective only if it shifts recipient countries to a significantly higher and sustainable growth path. We apply an alternative approach...

Advanced OECD countries are widely held responsible to contain global carbon emissions by providing financial and technical support to developing economies, where emissions are increasing most rapidly. It is open to question, however, whether more generous official development assistance would...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

It is widely believed that the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has grossly fallen short of high expectations raised by the Bush administration in 2002. From the perspective of potential recipient countries, the crucial issue is whether the MCC increased the overall pool of aid resources...

We assess empirically whether foreign official development assistance (ODA) has been effective in alleviating HIV/AIDS epidemics, which figures prominently among the Millennium Development Goals. We employ a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach to identify the treatment effect of ODA...

This paper analyzes whether and to what extent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) outperform official donors by allocating aid in a way that renders effective poverty alleviation more likely. We employ Probit and Tobit models and make use of an exceptionally detailed database that allows an...

This paper examines the long-run effect of foreign aid on income inequality for 21 recipient countries using panel cointegration techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias. We find that aid exerts an inequality increasing effect on income distribution. -- Inequality ;...

Recent studies offer an ambiguous picture on the effectiveness of foreign aid in strengthening the export capacity of recipient countries. Moreover, the literature on aid for trade (AfT) has often neglected that exporters in the donor countries may be among the main beneficiaries. We hypothesize...

The effects of foreign aid on the endowment of recipient countries with infrastructure have received surprisingly little attention in the empirical literature. This paper addresses this question by performing difference-in-difference-in-differences estimations, with the treatment defined as...

The question of whether aid recipient countries would benefit from stronger income effects if foreign donors provided higher quality aid has received scant attention so far. We make use of the ranking of donors by the Center for Global Development to compare the effects of quality-adjusted aid...