In this Policy Briefing we address the question of whether there is a coherent and consistent policy when it comes to giving development aid. While one would theoretically argue that aid provision should be based on objective criteria set out to optimize governments' behavior or people's...

We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we test if aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. For a large sample of 145 recipient...