This paper documents that developing countries with opaque institutions receive procyclical development aid and procyclical promises of future aid while developing countries with transparent institutions receive countercyclical aid. It provides a dynamic equilibrium model of optimal aid policy...

Official development assistance is a key source of external finance in many developing countries. A striking feature of these aid flows is their positive correlation with business cycles in recipient countries. This pattern is puzzling in that it reinforces recipients' already strong and costly...

We document the real business cycle properties of foreign aid to poor countries. We show that aid exhibits the following empirical regularities over a twenty-five year period. First, it represents a significant source of income for the recipients. Second, it is very volatile--two to three times...

In this paper, we document empirical regularities in the foreign aid flows to developing countries over the last three decades. In spite of a large body of literature on foreign aid and its impact on recipients, surprisingly little is known about its business cycle characteristics. We show that,...

Official development assistance is a key source of external finance in many developing countries. A striking feature of these aid flows is their positive correlation with the business cycle of recipient countries. This pattern is puzzling in that it reinforces recipients' already strong and...

The present paper contributes to the literature by providing arguments and evidence on volatility of government expenditure, especially social spending and the role of foreign aid. Empirical findings from government spending data for 27 countries between 1990 and 2008 suggest that social...

This paper contributes to the large debate regarding the impact of oil price changes on U.S. GDP growth. Firstly, it replicates empirical findings of prominent studies and finds that the proposed oil price measures have a dissipating effect with recent data up to 2016Q4. Secondly, it re-examines...

A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal...

This paper uses the cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) model to assess the dynamic relationship between foreign aid inflows, public expenditure, revenue and domestic borrowing in Ethiopia. It departs from the existing literature by using a unique quarterly fiscal dataset (1993-2008) and...