This study investigates how government ideology matters for the success of World Bank economic policy loans, which typically support market-liberalizing reforms. A simple model predicts that World Bank staff will invest more effort in designing an economic policy loan when faced with a left-wing...

This study tests two opposing hypotheses about the impact of aid fragmentation on the practice of aid tying. In one, when a small number of donors dominate the aid market in a country, they may exploit their monopoly power by tying more aid to purchases from contractors based in their own...

This study investigates how government ideology matters for the success of World Bank economic policy loans, which typically support market-liberalizing reforms. A simple model predicts that World Bank staff will invest more effort in designing an economic policy loan when faced with a left-wing...

This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending on the quality of economic policy. It finds that the quality of policy increases, but at a diminishing rate, with the cumulative number of policy loans. Similar results hold for the cumulative number of conditions...

This study analyzes theoretically and empirically the impact of aid fragmentation on donors’ decisions to tie their development aid to purchases from contractors based in their own countries. Building on collective action theory, it argues that a donor with a larger share of the aid market in...

It is well-established that armed political conflict has a detrimental effect on food security and household welfare: conflict induces food insecurity by reducing own food production, access to food through the market, and various other resources to sustain healthy and productive lives. One way...

Since the turn of the millennium the aid business has witnessed an important shift in the conceptualization and practice of aid delivery. The move towards harmonized and aligned approaches, including the need to make aid more predictable and flexible, introduced the budget support modality....

J. B. DeLong and others have shown that cross-country convergence in per capita incomes is limited to samples of currently-industrialized nations or universal-literacy nations. In particular, income dispersion has failed to decline in groups of ex ante rich nations. This study finds strong...

The global financial crisis has already led to sharp downturns in the developing world. In the past, international aid has been able to offset partially the effects of crises that began in the developing world, but because this crisis began in the wealthy countries, donors may be less willing or...

Conventional political wisdom holds that inclement weather on election day reduces turnout and helps elect Republican candidates. Analysis of National Climatic Data Center weather records and National Election Studies survey data for 1984, 1986, and 1988 refutes the latter hypothesis:...