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 account for the competition for export markets among the donor countries of foreign aid by analyzing spatial dependence in aid allocation. We employ sector-specific aid data, distinguishing between first and second stage decisions on the selection of recipient countries and the amount of aid...

NGOs are widely perceived to raise their flag in humanitarian hot-spots with strong media presence in order to attract higher private donations. We assess this hypothesis by comparing the changes in donations between US-based NGOs with and without activities in the four countries most affected...

It is a widely held belief that foreign direct investment (FDI) has a positive effect on economic growth. We test this hypothesis by performing convergence regressions derived from a model of endogenous technological change. We estimate the rate of growth in per-capita income, relative to the...

The regional allocation of aid within recipient countries has been largely ignored in the aid allocation literature. We use geocoded data on the location of aid projects financed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank within a sample of 27 recipient countries to assess the claim of...

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional...

We address the question of whether foreign aid helps attract foreign direct investment (FDI). This could be achieved if well targeted aid removed critical impediments to higher FDI inflows. In particular, test the hypothesis that aid for education is an effective means to increase FDI flows to...

We analyze the concentration of FDI in India at the district level, based on project-specific location choices since the reform program in the early 1990s. The decomposition property of the Theil index allows us to trace changes over time in the overall concentration of FDI to changes in...

The targeting of foreign aid within recipient countries is largely unexplored territory. We help close this gap in empirical research on aid allocation by employing Poisson estimations on the determinants of the World Bank’s choice of project locations at the district level in India. The...