We present a two-step approach of assessing whether major donors of foreign aid have met recent demands for less proliferated and better coordinated aid efforts. First, we calculate Theil indices revealing the concentration of each donor's aid on recipient countries and specific aid sectors....

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional...

How do shifts in the global balance of power shape the world economy? We propose a theory of alignment-based “hegemonic globalization”, built on two central premises: countries differ in their preferences over policies (such as the rule of law or regulatory frameworks) and trade between any...

This paper analyzes how international rules are established and stabilized, i.e. how an international institutional order develops. Rules emerge mainly through learning from negative experience and serve to reduce transaction costs. The paper looks at mechanisms that stabilize rule systems, at...

The rapid diffusion of the internet and electronic commerce changes the way business and international trade take place. The new economy poses new challenges to the international regulatory framework, since small distortions due to differing sets of regulations and taxation between countries...

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official...

The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by concentrating aid on countries with "good" policies. It is shown that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest correlation to growth when their magnitudes...

The political economy literature highlights the redistribution of resources to political support groups - often along regional or ethnic lines - as an axiom of political systems. In contrast to this dominant pattern, Kasara (2007) documents a puzzling result of discriminatory rent extraction by...

Timely assistance is a precondition for effective emergency relief in the aftermath of natural disasters. This paper shows that donor countries take faster aid decisions if they have stronger strategic interests at stake. We analyze a trilateral panel (donor, donor, recipient) of daily...

The targeting of foreign aid within recipient countries is largely unexplored territory. We help close this gap in empirical research on aid allocation by employing Poisson estimations on the determinants of the World Bank’s choice of project locations at the district level in India. The...