The cross-country literature on foreign aid effectiveness has relied on the use of instruments to distinguish causality from mere correlation. This paper uses simple non-instrumental techniques in the spirit of Granger to demonstrate that the main aid-growth connection is a negative causal...

Like many public policy debates, that over whether foreign aid works carries on in two worlds. Within the research world, it plays out in the form of papers full of technical language, formulas, and numbers. Outside, the arguments are plainer and the audience broader, but those academic studies...

Like many public policy debates, that over whether foreign aid works carries on in two worlds. Within the research world, it plays out in the form of papers full of technical language, formulas, and numbers. Outside, the arguments are plainer and the audience broader, but those academic studies...

Systematic sampling is a commonly used technique due to its simplicity and ease of implementation. The drawback of this simplicity is that it is not possible to estimate the design variance without bias. There are several ways to circumvent this problem. One method is to suppose that the...

The estimation of the sample size is a crucial part of the planning process of a survey and it can be accomplished in different ways, some of them require information not available or that may be obtained with a substantial cost. The estimation of the sample size can be done by using the design...

In stratified sampling there are designs with one unit selected per stratum or when one is willing to make estimations on unplanned domains with one unit in some strata. In these cases the variance is generally estimated by the collapsed strata method, which requires identification of the strata...

In probability sampling, variance estimation of an estimated mean or total requires developing a mathematical expression that depends on the design used to extract a sample. These formulae can be difficult to build and sometimes involve computation of joint inclusion probabilities of selection,...

Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research into the causes and consequences of civil wars, belatedly bringing the topic into the economics mainstream. This article critically reviews this interdisciplinary...

The world of international development assistance is undergoing three concomitant revolutions, which concur to the emergence of a truly global policy. First, it is living through a diversification of the goals it is asked to pursue: to its traditional objective of ushering convergence between...

In the estimation of proportions using simple random sampling, the maximum value of the variance can be used to compute the sample size when there is no information of the variable of interest. We extend this result to the estimation of proportions under two-stage cluster sampling with equal...