We argue that the tilt toward donor interests over recipient needs in aid allocation and practices may be particularly strong in new partnerships. Using the natural experiment of Eastern transition we find that commercial and strategic concerns influenced both aid flows and entry in the first...

We test the hypothesis that aid recipient governments are better able to utilize aid flows for political favoritism during periods in which they are of geo-strategic value to major donors. We examine the effect of a country's (non-permanent) membership on the United Nations Security Council...

This paper is about cronyism, or the arrangements by which influential firms receive economic favors. This phenomenon has been documented in numerous case studies, but rarely formalized or analyzed quantitatively. We offer a formal voting model in which cronyism is modeled as a contract where...

Dictatorships do not survive by repression alone. Rather, dictatorial rule is often explained as an authoritarian bargain by which citizens relinquish political rights for economic security. The applicability of the authoritarian bargain to decision-making in non-democratic states, however, has...

As concerns about reform fatigue in lower- and middle-income countries have become more widespread, so has the search for ways of boosting support for market-oriented reforms. While the effects of political institutions on reform results have been extensively analyzed, there has been relatively...