Policy reforms are often multifaceted. In the rent-seeking literature policies are usually taken as one-dimensional. This paper models policy formation using a political contest with endogenous policy proposals containing two dimensions. The two dimensions provide an opportunity to trade off one...

As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

Various development objectives are worthy, but to my mind, one objective dominates all others: reducing the scourge of absolute economic misery in the world. In this paper, I focus on an important but relatively underemphasized approach to poverty reduction: helping the poor earn more in the...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...

This paper evaluates the effect of development project aid from the World Bank and China on firms' sales growth, using a large dataset of 110864 firms spanning 121 countries between 2001 and 2016. We find that, contrary to the World Bank, Chinese ODA projects increase, on average, firm sales...

Donor aid organizations (DAOs) are multi-layered and multi-dimensional bureaucracies with many departments trying to find solutions to problems for countries, investing staff resources and effort into having an effect. A department may come into conflict with other departments because of...

We experimentally study the influence of local information conditions on elite capture and social exclusion in community-based development schemes with heterogeneous groups. Not only information on the distribution of aid resources through community-based schemes, but also information on who...

We investigate a team setting in which workers have different degrees of commitment to theoutcome of their work. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if theteam manager has some information about team members, interventions that the managerundertakes in order to assure...

In recent decades, information and communication technology (ICT) has been associated with far-reaching changes in the design of jobs. However, it still remains unclear whether these changes will lead to more centralization or more decentralization in firms. Previous literature on this debate...

We develop a formula for the optimal size of a joint savings association between individuals who share the same financial goal and who can save towards that goal at the same rate. Our motivating example and the core of our analysis is a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). We measure...