We examine the composition and drivers of cross-border bank lending between 1995 and 2012, distinguishing between syndicated and non-syndicated loans. We show that on-balance sheet syndicated loan exposures, which account for almost one third of total cross-border loan exposures, increased...

We examine the cyclical properties of development aid using bilateral data for 22 donors and 113 recipients during 1970–2005. We find that bilateral aid flows are on average procyclical with respect to the business cycle in both donor and recipient countries. While aid outlays contract sharply...

We examine the causal impact of the 2002–2007 civil conflict in Côte d'Ivoire on children's health using household surveys collected before, during, and after the conflict, and information on the exact location and date of conflict events. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting both...

Grouped data have been widely used to analyze the global income distribution because individual records from nationally representative household surveys are often unavailable. In this paper we evaluate the performance of nonparametric density smoothing techniques, in particular kernel density...

This paper examines the phenomenon of real-income stagnation (in which real-income growth is uninterruptedly negligible or negative for a sizable sequence of years). We analyse data for four decades from a large cross-section of countries. Real income stagnation is a conceptually distinct...

We examine the impact of the 2002-07 civil conflict in Cote d'Ivoire on children's health status measured by height-for-age. We use pre- and post-war survey data coupled with information on the location of violent incidents to capture exposure to the conflict of children born during 1997-2007....

We analyze the growth impact of official development assistance to developing countries. Our approach is different from that of previous studies in two major ways. First, we disentangle the effects of two kinds of aid: developmental and non-developmental. Second, our specifications allow for the...

Current estimates of global poverty vary substantially across studies. We undertake a sensitivity analysis to highlight the importance of methodological choices by measuring global poverty using different data sources, parametric and nonparametric estimation methods, and multiple poverty lines....

We analyze the global banking network using data on cross-border banking flows for 184 countries during 1978–2010. We find that the density of the global banking network defined by these flows is pro-cyclical, expanding and contracting with the global cycle of capital flows. We also find that...