Despite a series of official agreements aimed at strengthening Bank-Fund cooperation, it is widely believed that coordination between the two organizations often falls short of what should be rationally expected. A greater pressure for conformity, required by the need of coordination, may...

This paper analyzes the impact of different governance structures on the degree of Bank-Fund cooperation, focusing on the quality of their information transmission. It compares the performance of a decentralized governance with that of a centralized one. A centralized structure better addresses...

Context-specific knowledge is crucial to crafting multilateral reform programs. Nonetheless local knowledge often consists of unverifiable information, thus the quality of countries' reports depends on the conflict of interests faced by the recipient and the multilateral. We compare the...

This paper shows how public debt repurchases can be used to reduce the costs of debt service under the hypothesis that the government could be of two types and that there is asymmetric information between the government and the private sector. For example, at the beginning of a fiscal...

We investigate the informal influence of political leaders' spouses on the subnational allocation of foreign aid. Building new worldwide datasets on personal characteristics of political leaders and their spouses as well as on geocoded development aid projects (including new data on 19 Western...

We investigate the informal influence of political leaders’ spouses on the subnational allocation of foreign aid. Building new worldwide datasets on personal characteristics of political leaders and their spouses as well as on geocoded development aid projects (including new data on 19...

This paper provides new evidence on the role of IMF programs in stimulating private sector investments. Using detailed firm-level data on tangible fixed assets and a local projection methodology, we first estimate the dynamic response of firm investments to the approval of an IMF arrangement. We...