Donor reactions to recent settlements of internal conflicts have been highly diverse, in terms of both overall aid and its sectoral composition. The allocation of post-conflict aid tends to be needs-based by favoring particularly poor countries. There is no conclusive evidence, however, that the...

Sanctions are meant to coerce political adversaries through economic measures. However, evidence for their effectiveness is scarce. In this paper we assess the impact of sanctions on a democracy - France - by studying the electoral consequences of the sanctions and countersanctions imposed...

It is widely believed that foreign aid may help conflict-affected countries to recover after the settlement of conflicts. However, the available empirical evidence supporting this view largely neglects the heterogeneous nature of aid. Drawing on the conflict database of the Uppsala Conflict Data...

This paper quantifies the impact of incentives related to potential membership on institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI). Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2008 we show that pre-accession incentives provided by EU and...

Among ENP countries, Azerbaijan is outstanding because it leans on its resource base and sees the EU at the receiving end of bilateral relations. At the other extreme, Ukraine depends on EU cooperation, especially with respect to trade. We develop a comprehensive theoretical concept for...

The Covid-19 pandemic is a major test for governments around the world. We study the political consequences of (mis-)managing the Covid crisis by constructing a highfrequency dataset of government approval for 35 countries. In the first weeks after the outbreak, approval rates for incumbents...

In an integrated global economy, the economic fallout of war is not confined to the country where the conflict is fought but spills over to other countries. We study the economic effects of large interstate wars using a new data set spanning 150 years of data for more than 60 countries. War on a...

Economic sanctions are a frequent instrument of foreign policy. In a diplomatic conflict, they aim to elicit a change in the policies of foreign governments by damaging their economy. However, sanctions are not costless for the sending economy, where domestic firms involved in business with the...

Apart from altruistic reasons, NGOs may engage in developing countries under conditions of conflict and war in order to secure funding and survive in the ‘market’ of humanitarian relief and development assistance. Applying a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we analyze...

How do exporting firms react to sanctions? Specifically, which firms are willing - or capable - to serve the market of a sanctioned country? We investigate this question for four sanctions episodes drawing on recent econometric advances in bias-corrected dynamic high-dimensional fixed effects...