We study a recent merit-based financial program for the poor in Colombia. We exploit sharp eligibility rules in household wealth and standardized test scores to identify the causal effect of financial aid on postsecondary enrollment and academic performance. We find large positive effects on...

To examine poverty on China's campuses, we utilize the Chinese College Students Survey carried out in 2010. With poverty line defined as the college-specific expenditures a student needs to maintain the basic living standard on campus, we find that 22 percent of college students in China are...

The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by concentrating aid on countries with "good" policies. It is shown that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest correlation to growth when their magnitudes...

Background: The pitfall of top-down approach to development is identified as a major cause of aid inefficiency. The approach is fraught with corruption and unethical practices that have bedeviled aid administration. Meanwhile, the impact of remittances has been widely acknowledged in the...

Aid fragmentation is widely recognized as being detrimental to development outcomes. We re-investigate the impact of fragmentation on aid effectiveness in the context of growth, bureaucratic policy, and education, focusing on a number of conceptually different indicators of fragmentation, and...