This thesis consists of four essays on the political economy of foreign aid. These essays cover issues related to the allocation, the timing, and the economic consequences of foreign aid for recipient countries. Chapters 1 and 3 consider the allocation of official development assistance across...

When analyzing the impact of international organizations on the environment, two main issues arise. First, we have to quantify the participation of the organizations on countries they deal with.Second, the environmental impact of this involvement has to be measured. This paper attempts to do...

We analyze the aid portfolio of various bilateral and multilateral donors, testing whether they have prioritised aid in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In doing so, we combine sectorally disaggregated aid data with indicators reflecting the situation of recipient countries...

Using a new dataset for 41 German non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we analyze the allocation of NGO aid across recipient countries in a Tobit regression framework. By identifying for each NGO the degree of public refinancing, we address the largely unresolved issue of whether financial...