Using a large, original database of 385 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt, we document for the first time the negative impact of cronyism on economic growth. In the early 2000s, a policy shift in Egypt led to the expansion of crony activities into new, previously...

This paper analyzes influences on the credit standing of Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), specifically the quality, diversification and single name concentration of their portfolios, and on the market practice known as Preferred Creditor Status (PCS), whereby sovereigns that default on...

The literature on development effectiveness has traditionally focused on the ex-post analysis of projects. While this is the appropriate method of measuring benefits, a previous step must be taken as a forerunner to good ex-post evaluation: the measurement of the efficiency in the execution of...

Organizations in the humanitarian sector often face problems that are hard to solve owing to their complexity and high hidden solution knowledge. We investigate two problem-solving governance mechanisms in the case of floods in Indonesia. In our study, we compare the costs and benefits of two...

We consider a two-stage public goods provision game: In the first stage, players simultaneously decide if they will join a contribution group or not. In the second stage, players in the contribution group simultaneously offer contribution schemes in order to influence the government’s choice...