A number of political economy concerns are associated with the provision of foreign aid to developing economies. These concerns suggest that foreign aid is likely to have harmful effects on a recipient's institutional quality; also that attempts to give aid conditional on policy and...

We examine the empirical relationship between Internet subscriptions and foreign aid flows for 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members for a 15 year time period employing the median voter model. We find that Internet use is positively related to the amount of foreign aid that donor...

We examine whether aid affects recipient countries’ economic freedom. The existing empirical literature examining this relationship has found conflicting results. However, all of these existing studies have struggled to employ plausible identification strategies to find a causal relationship...

If donor country citizens are altruistic, their support for foreign aid will be instrumental and the (perceived) effects of a donor’s aid can be enjoyed non- rivalrously by citizens of all countries. Alternatively, donor country citizens may achieve a “warm-glow” from their own...

Using a panel of up to 116 countries from 1970-2010 we estimate the effects of foreign aid flows on a variety of measures of institutional quality. We find that aid flows are associated with the deterioration of both political and economic institutions. Regarding the latter, aid flows are...

We employ matching methods to explore the relationships between foreign aid flows and corruption in recipient countries. Data are drawn from recipients of foreign aid for the 1996 to 2013 period. We find no compelling evidence of an effect running from corruption to aid flows. Furthermore, point...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels.