We empirically assess the determinants of India’s FDI outflows across a large sample of host countries in the 1996-2009 period. Based on gravity model specifications, we employ Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimators. Major findings include: India’s outward FDI is hardly affected...

We construct comprehensive and comparable indices on the most relevant components of economic infrastructure. An unobserved components model is employed to cover the largest possible number of developing and developed countries over the period 1990-2010. We map major findings from the new...

We argue that the trend toward international investment agreements (IIAs) with stricter investment rules is driven by competitive diffusion, namely defensive moves of developing countries concerned about foreign direct investment (FDI) diversion in favor of competing host countries. Accounting...

Based on original survey data, this paper analyses and compares the role of personal traits and social capital in determining entrepreneurial intentions of students in Hong Kong and in Guangzhou (mainland China). The two cities are culturally closely related but differ strongly with respect to...

Political proximity between donor and recipient governments may impair the effectiveness of aid by encouraging favoritism. By contrast, political misalignment between donor and recipient governments may render aid less effective by adding to transaction costs and giving rise to incentive...

NGOs could help scale up foreign aid efforts by mobilizing private donations. However, fundraising activities do not necessarily result in higher donations, and substitution effects between different sources of revenue may diminish the overall pool of NGOs’ resources. This paper examines the...

Aid flows continue to be volatile and unpredictable, even though it is widely accepted that this erodes the effectiveness of foreign aid. We argue that fragmented donor-recipient relationships, notably the large number of minor aid relations that tend to be associated with donors’ desire to...

Night lights could be a valuable proxy of economic activity at the subnational level when GDP data are lacking or of poor quality. Supplementing Henderson et al.’s (2012) analysis at the national level, we assess the stability of the elasticity of GDP with regard to night lights across regions...

This paper examines the long-run effect of foreign aid on income inequality for 21 recipient countries using panel cointegration techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias. We find that aid exerts an inequality increasing effect on income distribution

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and – less robustly – commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political...