External aid donors have gradually shifted from a benign view of the African state to one that presumes a conflict of interest between the state and its own private sector. What are the implications of this diagnosis for the design of aid programs? We develop a model that locates slow growth in...

Recent literature surveys indicate the absence of definitive evidence distinguishing unitary from collective models of the household. In this paper, we exploit dramatic changes in divorce law legislation in Canada to test one variant of the collective approach, cooperative Nash bargained...

We focus on the management of highly persistent shocks to aid flows, including HIPC or MDG-related increases in net flows, in the presence of currency substitution by the domestic private sector. Such shocks have beneficent long-run effects, but when currency substitution is high they can...

We show that a combination of temporariness and spending pressure is intrinsic to the aid relationship. In our analysis, recipients rationally discount the pronouncements of donors about the duration of their commitments because in equilibrium they know that some donors will honor those...