We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of bilateral foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country's probability of receiving aid. The results show that...

Tariff reductions have gender-specific effects on the labor market that change the relative bargaining power within households, which in turn affects child outcomes. We estimate how changes in parental labor supply due to these tariff reductions affect child schooling by focusing on young...

We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Donor countries' political motives might reduce the effectiveness of conditionality, channel aid to inferior projects or affect the way aid is spent in other ways, reduce the aid bureaucracy's...

The empirical evidence currently available in the literature regarding the effects of a country's IMF program participation on its output growth is rather mixed. To shed new evidence on this issue, in this paper we specify a state- dependent panel data model accounting in particular for program...

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...

Fundraising interventions may lift donations and/or shift their composition and timing, making it important to study their effect across charity space and time. We find that major fundraising appeals lift total donations, but surprisingly shift donations to other charities across time. To...

The current EU Asylum policy is widely seen as ineffective and unfair. We propose an EU-wide market for tradable quotas on both refugees and asylum-seekers coupled with a matching mechanism linking countries’ and migrants’ preferences. We show that the proposed system can go a long way...

Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather...

Trade finance, particularly in the form of short-term letters of credit has received favourable capital treatment new Basel III rules. However, concerns have been expressed over the potential negative “unintended consequences” of the newly created leverage ratio for trade. This paper offers...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson’s [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from in-ternational financial...