Much public discussion about foreign aid has focused on whether and how to increase its quantity. But recently aid quality has come to the fore, by which is meant the efficiency of the aid delivery process. This paper focuses on one process problem, the proliferation of aid projects and the...

The total funding envelope for World Bank projects is often divided among various state and non-state actors, each of which can have competing ideas about or interests in the project. How does the division of financing relate to overall project effectiveness? I argue that too many funding...

While most economists assume that aid is fungible, most aid donors behave as if it is not. Recipient government responses to development project aid are studied in the context of a specific World Bank-financed project. We estimate the impact of a rural road rehabilitation project in Vietnam on...

Despite emerging study of business initiatives that attempt to support local peace and development, we still have significant knowledge gaps on their effectiveness and efficiency. This article builds theory on business engagements for peace through exploration of the Footprints for Peace (FOP)...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize how managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs) manage risk, particularly in fragile and/or conflict-affected areas of operation. The authors suggest that MNEs consider reducing risk at its source rather than trying to avoid or react...

The total funding envelope for World Bank projects is often divided among various state and non-state actors, each of which can have competing ideas about or interests in the project. How does the division of financing relate to overall project effectiveness? I argue that too many funding...

I study the causal effect of the foreign aid for development assistance —implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)— on the intensity of municipality-level armed conflict in Colombia, for the period 2009-2013. To address potential endogeneity biases, I use a...

This paper develops a two-period-two-country model in which an altruistic donor faces Samaritan's Dilemma to address two important policy questions: (i) whether foreign aid can lead to efficient level of capital investment in the recipient country and (ii) how do the form (e.g. budgetary...

We design a multiple project-funding contract that provides optimal incentives to recipients, in a setting where externalities exist among the multiple projects and where donors and recipients may differ in their valuation of the projects. To do so, we study optimal incentive payments in a...