This paper analyzes the important, yet often ignored, link between capital adjustment and the choice of fuels used by manufacturing firms. A novel econometric framework, which explicitly incorporates heterogeneous fuel-using capital stocks in the estimation of optimal fuel choice, is applied to...

Inflation persists at moderate rates (15-30 percent) in all the countries that successfully reduced triple-digit inflation in the 1980s. Several other countries--for example, Colombia--have experienced moderate inflation for prolonged periods. The authors introduce types of theories of...

This study investigates the World Bank's use of lending and non-lending instruments to affect the policy priorities of developing countries. In a typical year, the World Bank lends more than $30 billion to its client countries. It also spends approximately $200 million on the provision of...

This study uses loan-level data on syndicated lending to a large sample of developing countries between 1993 and 2017 to estimate the mobilization effects of multilateral development banks (MDBs), that is, their ability to crowd-in capital from private creditors. Controlling for a large set of...

Do elites capture foreign aid? This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management, but not in other financial centers. The estimates are...

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...

Seminal arguments in political economy hold that citizens will more readily demand accountability from governments for taxes than for non-tax revenue from oil or aid. Two identical experiments on large, representative subject pools in Ghana and Uganda probe the effects of different revenue types...

Using a high-frequency mobile phone survey of food security conducted by the World Food Programme, this paper investigates how food assistance and access to food changed following the announcement of famine-like conditions in the Republic of Yemen. Among the mobile phone?using population, the...