The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the “development-friendliness” of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2005 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...

Contemporary econometric literature has generated a large number of stories of the relationship between how much foreign aid a countries receives and how it grows. All the stories hinge on the statistical significance in cross-country regressions of a quadratic term involving aid. Among the...

We analyze microfinance institutions (MFIs) as businesses, asking how some succeed in covering costs, earning returns, attracting capital, and scaling up. We draw on existing literature and interviews with industry players and academics. Key microfinance business challenges include building...

The proliferation of aid projects may overburden recipient governments with reporting requirements, donor visits, and other administrative overhead, siphoning off scarce domestic recipient resources, such as tax revenue or the time of skilled government officials, from directly productive use....

Recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth. All the stories hinge on the statistical significance in cross-country regressions of a quadratic term involving aid. Among the stories are that aid raises growth (on average) 1) in countries where economic...

The difference and system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators are growing in popularity. As implemented in popular software, the estimators easily generate instruments that are numerous and, in system GMM, potentially suspect. A large instrument collection overfits endogenous...

xtabond2 may hold the record among user-written Stata modules for the most confused users (and perhaps the most-confused too). In this presentation, I motivate and describe, in pedagogic fashion, the Arellano-Bond and Blundell-Bond linear GMM dynamic panel estimators, drawing lessons from a...

Through designs akin to difference-in-differences, Bleakley (2007) produces evidence that the campaign to eradicate hookworm from the American South circa 1910 boosted school enrollment in childhood and income in adulthood. This comment works to replicate and reanalyze that study. Innovations...

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the “development-friendliness” of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2004 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...