I provide an overall empirical assessment of the motivations of ODA granted by rich countries to developing countries, as revealed by aid allocation behaviors. Aid motives combine self-interested and altruistic objectives. I use a three-dimensional panel dataset, combining the donor, recipient...

A positive empirical relationship is found between the level of foreign aid received by a country and the number of terrorist attacks originating from it. A simple model is used to explain it, where the donor delegates some actions against terrorism to the aid-recipient government. Aid is...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

This paper examines wage inequality in the manufacturing sector for a panel of Latin American and East Asian economies during the last three decades. A labor supply and demand model is presented where three main determinants of wage inequality are investigated: trade openness, technology...

The present paper analyzes how policy intervention should be designed so as to create industrialization. We focus on whether intervention should be targeted, promoting investment in specific firms or industries, or broad based, increasing the profitability of investment in general. Our main...

International donors usually have particular goals they want to achieve with their foreign aid, e.g., poverty alleviation. In the international aid story lobbying by potential recipient groups attempting to capture the donor's support plays a potentially important role for non-governmental...

Is the World Bank's Development Policy Lending likely to enhance ownership and have greater effectiveness than structural adjustment? We specify a dynamic common agency model in which a government considering economic reform faces domestic opposition from interest groups. The dynamic...

Some Asian countries experience small real exchange rate appreciations or even a real depreciation despite a fast growth in tradable productivity. A key-characteristic of these countries is that they are constrained on capital inflows. Is the Balassa-Samuelson theory still valid in those...

We empirically examine whether and how opportunistic and partisan political business cycle ("PBC") considerations explain election-period decisions by credit rating agencies ("agencies") publishing developing country sovereign risk-ratings ("ratings"). Analyses of 391 agency ratings for 19...

Does labeling products "Child-Labor Free" provide a market-based solution to the pervasive employment of child labor? This paper explores the promise of social labeling in the context of its four oft-noted objectives: child labor employment, consumer information, welfare, and trade linkages,...