Hopes for development aid remain high among Western politicians and pundits, but the evidence is depressing. Foreign aid has on average probably no effect on long-run growth. To understand the failure of many development projects, we need a deeper consideration of the failure of top-down...

The United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have revived again the phenomenon of “regime change” that was thought to have died with the Cold War. We study Cold War “regime changes” for insight, although of course they do not extrapolate exactly to modern events. The recent...

A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes. This literature has had a serious gap: no direct measure of colonial European settlement. In this paper, we (1) construct a new database on...

The ghost of a long-dead growth model still haunts aid to developing countries. The Harrod-Domar growth model supposedly died long ago. But for more than 40 years, economists working on developing countries have applied- still apply- Harrod-Domar model to calculate short-run investment...

The poor suffer more from inflation than the rich do, reveals this survey of poor people in 38 countries. Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top...

Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern. This result survives several robustness checks. Also, direct measures of improvements...