We test the hypothesis that aid recipient governments are better able to utilize aid flows for political favoritism during periods in which they are of geo-strategic value to major donors. We examine the effect of a country's (non-permanent) membership on the United Nations Security Council...

This paper is about cronyism, or the arrangements by which influential firms receive economic favors. This phenomenon has been documented in numerous case studies, but rarely formalized or analyzed quantitatively. We offer a formal voting model in which cronyism is modeled as a contract where...

In this paper we analyse the impact of foreign aid on gender outcomes and attitudes. We do this by matching geocoded household surveys with aid projects. This offers a middle way between project evaluations and aggregated cross-country comparisons, measuring an average community effect around...