We examine the impact of geo-referenced World Bank development programs on subnational development using equally sized grid cells with a spatial resolution of 0.5 decimal degrees latitude x longitude as the unit of investigation. The proposed grid cell approach solves a number of endogeneity...

We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of bilateral foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country’s probability of receiving aid. The results show that...

This paper provides new empirical findings on the aid-growth relation. We find evidence for considerable asymmetry in the aid-growth relation; i.e., aid cuts have a large negative impact on economic activity, while increasing aid may be ineffective in promoting growth. Development aid thus...