Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by outcomes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, where procedures are defined independently of an outcome. To that end, we design procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry the same information on...

This paper takes a systematic look at the economic impact of the crisis that started in earnest in the fall of 2008 across countries and regions. Despite warnings of growing domestic and external imbalances in many countries years ahead of the crisis, the massive impact of the crisis came as a...

The recent focus on impact evaluation within development economics has lead to increased pressure on aid agencies to provide "hard evidence", i.e. results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), to motivate how they spend their money. In this paper I argue that even though RCTs can help us...

Development aid donors disburse aid to many developing countries. This paper shows that whether a partnership is established early or late matters significantly for aid quantities. Donor countries allocate larger shares of their aid budgets to recipients that entered early in their portfolios....

This paper measures and compares fragmentation in aid sectors. Past studies focused on aggregate country data but a sector analysis provides a better picture of fragmentation. We start by counting the number of aid projects in the developing world and find that, in 2007, more than 90 000...

We extend the Ståhl-Rubinstein alternating-offer bargaining procedure to allow players, prior to each bargaining round, to simultaneously and visibly commit to some share of the pie. If commitment costs are small but increasing in the committed share, then the unique outcome consistent with...

This paper introduces the payoff-confirming analogy-based expectation equilibrium (PCABEE) as a way to refine the set of analogy-based equilibria and the associated admissible analogy partitions. In addition to the actions of others, own payoff history provides information about others’...

The paper studies theoretically how the optimal contract in the hidden-action moral hazard model is affected when an agent feels bad when not reaching a target effort set in the contract. While the presence of guilt brings the outcome closer to first-best, an effort target is not costless for...

Although there exists a vast literature on aid efficiency (the effect of aid on GDP), and that aid allocation determinants have been estimated, little is known about the minute details of aid allocation. This article investigates empirically a claim repeatedly made in the past that aid donors...

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are...