Despite the rapid growth of emerging donors, these non-traditional donors are historically left out of the discussion on aid effectiveness. In this paper, we provide the first full evaluation of aid agency best practices. We rank and compare DAC (Development Assistance Committee) donors,...

Using data from 2004-2008-2012, we provide the first multi-year agency monitoring of Development Assistance Committee (DAC), multilateral, and United Nations (UN) agencies. Our results suggest that, on average, DAC donor performance has declined while multilateral and UN agency performance has...

Property rights institutions, including contract enforcement, are recognized as a fundamental determinant to economic performance. However, understanding how to secure property remains elusive. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework and empirical analysis to unpack the black box...

Does culture affect the manner in which a society regulates the entry of new firms? Our results suggest it does. We find more individualistic countries regulate entry more lightly. This result is robust to different measures of individualism and to a variety of controls for cultural values and...

This essay examines Hernando De Soto's work on property rights, which can be viewed as providing two separate testable hypotheses: 1) secure property rights are positively correlated with access to credit and capital formation, which leads to economic development, and 2) land titling programs...

Foreign aid critics, supporters, recipients and donors have produced eloquent rhetoric on the need for better aid practices – has this translated into reality? This paper attempts to monitor the best and worst of aid practices among bilateral, multilateral, and UN agencies. We create aid...