Studies of aid effectiveness abound in the literature, often with opposing conclusions. Since most time-series studies use data from the exact same publicly available data bases, our claim here is that such differences in results must be due to the use of different econometric models and...

Recent writing on industrial policy stresses the need for coordination between the public and private sectors. This paper examines the performance of one such coordination mechanism, Presidential Investors' Advisory Councils, in Ethiopia, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. It finds that the councils...

Do aid projects affect citizens' motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries. We first employ a subnational analysis, where the treatment varies by administrative...

While there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of foreign aid on intergenerational educational...

Over the past two decades, donors increasingly linked foreign aid to democracy objectives in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet systematic research on this topic typically focuses on how aid influences democratic transitions. This study investigates whether and how foreign aid affects the process of...

How does aid impact democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on existing literature, this study elaborates on the various channels, direct and indirect, through which development and democracy aid has influenced transitions to multi-party regimes and democratic consolidation within the region....

The paper reviews the dynamics of the financing baseed its analysis on the rich dataset of AidData ranging over 1993-2010, with around 9,077 observations on projects funded in Senegal by various multilateral as well as bilateral donors. The study started in the same year as the establishment of...

Agriculture plays an important role in terms of employment and its contribution to gross domestic product in many African countries. Thus, any policy initiative targeted towards poverty reduction in Africa should consider the agricultural sector as the major priority area. Unfortunately, the...

Growth and poverty reduction in Africa are weakly linked. This paper argues that the reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation - the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors - has not featured in Africa's post-1995 growth story. As a...