The Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) is the latest phase of debt reduction for poor countries from the World Bank, the IMF, and the African Development Bank. The MDRI, which will come close to full debt reduction for at least 19 (and perhaps as many as 40) qualifying countries, is...

This paper examines whether foreign aid in education has a significant effect on growth. We take into consideration the heterogeneous nature of aid as well as the heterogeneity of aid recipients - we disaggregate the aid data into primary, secondary and higher education, and run separate...

This Article brings to the attention of those public servants involved in the design and negotiation of free trade agreements between the United States and developing countries, such as Colombia, the potential benefits and drawbacks of negotiating in a bilateral forum. Rather than critiquing the...

This paper explores the impact of foreign aid on economic growth using variation in aid inflows from natural disasters. Because using a country's own disaster exposure as an instrument for aid inflows violates exogeneity assumptions, I instead use the disaster exposure of a country's "aid...

Foreign aid effectiveness has been a hot topic for several decades. Bangladesh has been receiving foreign assistance since its independence in 1971 and has taken various initiatives in enhancing the effectiveness of aid. The signing of the Paris Declaration is one such initiative where the...

Any act of terrorism should not be only viewed from the viewpoint of law and justice or human rights but it is equally important to understand its impact on economy. The economic impact of terrorism will include not only the direct cost but also indirect cost and has a multiplier effect also....

We examine the link between extreme weather events and national aid and transfers at the municipal level in the Philippines between 1992 and 2015. Using local-level data of public income and expenditures, local precipitation, poverty incidence, and satellite-based night light luminosity, we find...

I study the causal effect of the foreign aid for development assistance —implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)— on the intensity of municipality-level armed conflict in Colombia, for the period 2009-2013. To address potential endogeneity biases, I use a...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the effect of growth on poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but I find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less from...

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) awards aid to countries that perform well on a set of independently compiled governance indicators. Proponents of this new form of aid argue that 1) aid will be more effective when given to well-governed countries and 2) countries will respond to such...