The loans of the IMF, World Bank, and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) are excluded from debt restructuring. This is the result of their preferred creditor status. There are two justifications for the preferred creditor status of MDBs: (a) they give concessional loans, and (b) they...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, implementation, and completion dates of Chinese development projects. We use data from the Gallup World Poll for 126 countries over...

China's development model challenges the approaches of traditional Western donors like the World Bank. We argue that both aim at stability, but differ in the norms propagated to achieve that. Using fixed effects and IV estimations, we analyze a broad range of subnational stability measures in...

As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

We develop a screening model to analyse the funding allocation criteria of institutional donors towards NGOs. The model shows that when donors care about efficiency, they screen NGOs and concentrate their funding on those that comply. Combining two waves, 2002 and 2008, of a unique survey data...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? To answer this question, we collect data on 173 countries between 1968 and 2014. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the global patterns of U.S. military aid, our paper is the first to provide causal estimates of the effect of U.S. military...

This chapter discusses the role of military interventionism and aid in nation-building. We argue that (1) intervention strategies of foreign actors like the United States often unfavorably interact with local institutional settings, which (2) produces undesired outcomes not only for the target...

We analyze the relationship between Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and external donors, with the aim of contributing to the debate on "mission drift" in microfinance. We assume that both the donor and the MFI are pro-poor, possibly at different extents. Borrowers can be (very) poor or...