This article documents a positive and sizable correlation between the location of historical Christian missions and the allocation of present-day World Bank aid at the grid-cell level in Africa. The correlation is robust to an extensive set of geographical and historical control variables that...

Some multilateral agencies implement aid projects in a broad range of sectors, with aid disbursements showing a strong overlap with those of bilateral donors. The question then arises of why do bilateral donors delegate sizable shares of their aid to non-specialized agencies for implementation?...

The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature so far. Using a simple illustrative model, this paper examines the choice by sovereign donors among various trust fund options. The authors contend that the choice among...

Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, spoke about leaving behind the past and facing today's challenges squarely, constructively, and creatively. This is not the 1944 world that surrounded the creation of the Bank. Old models no longer fit current problems. The new "normal" will...

James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank Group, reflected upon the Asian financial crisis. What lessons are there that need to be learned? How do you position the Asian crisis? What went wrong? It is very hard to generalize; there are problems in the banking sector, and the private...