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...

International economic engagement has been increasingly framed in terms of liberal democratic values. Specifically, Chinese aid has been at the center of this debate. Since Chinese aid comes with "no strings attached," a popular narrative is that Chinese aid poses a challenge to conditional aid,...

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...

We examine how donor government ideology influences the composition of foreign aid flows. We use data for 23 OECD countries over the period 1960-2009 and distinguish between multilateral and bilateral aid, grants and loans, recipient characteristics such as income and political institutions,...

Economists typically evaluate policies based on how such policies affect individuals' utilities. We follow this approach by taking a welfarist view of the USA's espoused policy of promoting liberty in other parts of the world. However, we take a nuanced view by investigating the type of welfare...

We introduce a new supply-push' instrument for foreign aid, to be used together with an instrumental variable estimator that filters out unobserved common factors. We use this instrument to study the effects of aid on macroeconomic ratios, and especially the ratios of consumption, investment,...

This article investigates whether China’s foreign aid is particularly prone to political capture by political leaders of aid-receiving countries. Specifically, we examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders’ birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group...

This paper proposes a simple framework to better understand an opposition group’s choice between peace, terrorism, and open civil conflict against the government. Our model implies that terrorism emerges if constraints on the ruling executive group are intermediate and rents are sizeable,...

This article analyzes whether foreign aid affects the net flows of refugees from recipient countries. Combining refugee data on 141 origin countries over the 1976-2013 period with bilateral Official Development Assistance data, we estimate the causal effects of a country’s aid receipts on both...

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...