A broad consensus has emerged among practitioners and researchers that failure to build accountable and legitimate institutions is a critical risk factor associated with vicious circles of repeated violence. Despite this consensus, very few studies have tested the extent to which local...

This paper addresses the conditions under which donor and non-state actor service provision is likely to undermine or strengthen citizens' legitimating beliefs. On the one hand, citizens may be less likely to support their government with quasi-voluntary compliance when they credit non-state...

A central policy of the Government of Indonesia's strategy for enhancing its country's economic and social development is to develop infrastructure and expand service delivery. Public procurement reform is a key component of this policy. Despite the decentralization of financial responsibility...

Despite the democracy-enhancing intentions of most donors, foreign aid can often offer opportunities for governments to politically repress their populations. This chapter argues and presents evidence that aid from the world's largest bilateral donor - the United States - harms political rights...

I use a natural experiment of oil-price-driven remittance flows to poor, non-oil-producing Muslim countries to demonstrate that remittances deteriorate the quality of governance, especially in countries with weak democratic institutions. The results indicate that a 1 standard deviation increase...

We use oil price fluctuations to test the impact of transfers from wealthy OPEC nations to their poorer Muslim allies. The instrument identifies plausibly exogenous variation in foreign aid. We investigate how aid is spent by tracking its short-run effect on aggregate demand, national accounts,...

Nongovernmental organizations are one group of players who are active in the efforts of international development and increasing the welfare of poor people in poor countries. Nongovernmental organizations are largely staffed by altruistic employees and volunteers working towards ideological,...