Summary This paper develops a market-based procedure to significantly reduce the indebtedness of emerging markets by applying an asset-backed security approach to a pool of emerging market bonds. In an extensive simulation study based on historical data, the cumulated interest savings over a...

We investigate whether donors give more aid to countries with larger gender gaps in education, health, or women’s rights, and whether they reward improvements in those indicators. We find some evidence that high gender gaps in education and health are associated with higher allocation of aid...

In Nowak-Lehmann et al. (2012), we used time-series methods to investigate the impact of aid on per capita GDP. Lof, Mekasha, and Tarp (LMT, 2014) criticize our econometric approach, our interpretation, and our data-handling procedure which lead to a large share of missing observations in some...

Summary We analyze the targeting of non-governmental organization (NGO) aid across countries in a multivariate regression framework, based on a dataset for 61 important international NGOs. While our results show that NGOs are more active in the neediest countries, we reject the hypothesis that...

Summary Using panel data for 78 countries of origin we examine the impact of the inflow of foreign students in to the United States on migration patterns in the country over the 1971-2001 period. We find that the stock of foreign students is an important predictor of subsequent migration. The...

Summary We empirically analyze the effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) involvement on the risk of entering a currency crisis and, respectively, the outcome of such a crisis. Specifically, we investigate whether countries with previous IMF intervention are more likely to experience...

This article provides a survey of the aid budget literature and examines the determinants of the development aid efforts of 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members over the 1976–2011 period. In fixed effects regressions, we identify aid inertia, per-capita GDP, the creation of an...

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking,...

Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives, and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. At the same time, it is open to question whether new...