We study the determinants of educational and cognitive outcomes of young adults in Madagascar and Senegal employing a production function approach. Using unique and comparable long-term panel data sets from both countries, we find that cognitive skills measured using test scores in second grade...

Studies of aid effectiveness abound in the literature, often with opposing conclusions. Since most time-series studies use data from the exact same publicly available data bases, our claim here is that such differences in results must be due to the use of different econometric models and...

Controversy over the aggregate impact of foreign aid has focused on reduced form estimates of the aid-growth link. The causal chain, through which aid affects developmental outcomes including growth, has received much less attention. We address this gap by: (i) specifying a structural model of...

This paper confirms recent evidence of a positive impact of aid on growth and widens the scope of evaluation to a range of outcomes including proximate sources of growth (e.g., physical and human capital), indicators of social welfare (e.g., poverty and infant mortality), and measures of...