The political economy literature highlights the redistribution of resources to political support groups – often along regional or ethnic lines – as a dominant feature of political systems. Against this assumption, Kasara (2007) documents a puzzling result of discriminatory rent extraction by...

The political economy literature highlights the redistribution of resources to political support groups - often along regional or ethnic lines - as a dominant feature of political systems. Against this assumption, Kasara (2007) documents a puzzling result of discriminatory rent extraction by...

We develop a political-economic model of foreign aid allocation. Each ethnic group in the donor country lobbies the government for allocating more aid to its country of origin, and the government accepts contributions from lobby groups. Initial per-capita income of the recipients and those of...

The targeting of foreign aid within recipient countries is largely unexplored territory. We help close this gap in empirical research on aid allocation by employing Poisson estimations on the determinants of the World Bank’s choice of project locations at the district level in India. The...