International aid has an ambiguous effect on the macro-economy of the recipient country. To the extent that aid raises consumer expenditure, there will be some real exchange rate appreciation and a shift of resources away from traded goods production and into non-traded goods production....

Several existing papers explore the extent to which the cross-country variation in measures of democracy and political rights can be explained by the cross-country variation in foreign aid inflows. Using panel data, we explore the extent to which the variation over time in such measures can be...

Despite anecdotal evidence that the quality of governance in recipient countries affects the allocation of international health aid, there is no quantitative evidence on the magnitude of this effect, or on which dimensions of governance influence donor decisions. We measure health aid flows over...

Using a new panel dataset for banks in eight West African countries, we explore the factors that exacerbate or alleviate excess liquidity, and the factors that promote or retard the rate of growth of banks' assets. Loan default rates in the region are high, and variations in the rate impact on...

We use monthly time-series data on the prices of 96 individual products in the 37 states of Nigeria to analyze the factors that drive inflation volatility. Among the significant determinants of volatility are average inflation rates, transport and communication infrastructure, consumer access to...

We put forward a plausible explanation of African financial underdevelopment in the form of a bad credit market equilibrium. Utilising an appropriately modified IO model of banking, we show that the root of the problem could be unchecked moral hazard (strategic loan defaults) or adverse...

Deviations from the Law of One Price across US cities are smaller than corresponding international deviations, but nevertheless substantial. We find that a proportion of these deviations can be explained by asymmetric responses to federal monetary policy shocks, and that a large part of the...

In the extensive empirical literature on aid effectiveness, aid is always measured as a share of GDP. However, measuring aid in real dollars per capita is also consistent with standard growth theory. We show that the choice of denominator makes an enormous difference to the sign and significance...

Broadly speaking, economic experiments and surveys have found trust to be much lower in Africa than in industrialized countries. We analyze new experimental and survey results from rural Cameroon, where the average level of trust appears to be much higher than is typical of Africa. A substantial...

In this paper we use experimental data collected in rural Cameroon to quantify the effect of social distance on trust and altruism. Our measure of social distance is one that is relevant to everyday economic interactions: subjects in a Trust Game play with fellow villagers or with someone from a...