This paper analyzes the respective impact of aid, remittances and medical brain drain on child mortality using panel and cross-country quintile-level data on respectively 84 and 46 developing countries. Our results show that remittances reduce child mortality and that the impact of health aid is...

This paper explores the impact of Malian migrants' Home Town Associations (HTAs) located in France on the provision of local public goods in Mali. To this end, we compute an original dataset on all the HTAs that have been created by Malian migrants in France since 1981 and geo-localize their...

We propose an econometric analysis of the distributive impact of trade flows, foreign direct investment (FDI), official aid and migrants’ remittances. Results suggest that FDI increases inequality, while remittances tend to reduce inequality. Trade and aid have a non-linear relationship with...

Using a 2006 household survey in Mali, we compare current poverty rates and inequality levels with counterfactual ones in the absence of migration and remittances. With proper hypotheses on migrants and a selection model, we are able to impute a counterfactual income for households currently...

This paper explores the impact of elections on economic policies and governance in developing countries. We distinguish between a structural effect, which increases accountability, and a cyclical effect which may be disruptive. Since the effects are offsetting, neither can be analyzed in...

We define ‘failing states’ are those low-income states in which policy and governance is persistently very bad. We develop a theory of reform in these states in which several characteristics of the society might potentially be the binding constraint on change. We then introduce aid,...

This paper extends and applies principal-agent theory to the performance of donor projects. There is variation in the degree of divergence between the interests of the donor (the principal) and the recipient government (the agent). Further, the effort expended on observation of the agent is a...

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers find that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results,...

This study aims at analyzing the standard of living of the Balbala residents in Djibouti, whose will benefit from an integrated urban development project (PDUI). The objective of the PDUI project is to improve standard of living of 30,000 people in three districts of Balbala, by developing basic...

In Africa, boundaries delineated during the colonial era now divide young independent states. By applying regression discontinuity designs to a large set of surveys covering the 1986-2001 period, this paper identifies many large and significant jumps in welfare at the borders between five...