We argue that membership in specific international organizations (IOs) is an important determinant of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. To the extent that membership restricts a country from pursuing policies that are harmful to investors, it can signal reduced political risk. Using data...

We investigate whether donors give more aid to countries with larger gender gaps in education, health, or women’s rights, and whether they reward improvements in those indicators. We find some evidence that high gender gaps in education and health are associated with higher allocation of aid...

In Nowak-Lehmann et al. (2012), we used time-series methods to investigate the impact of aid on per capita GDP. Lof, Mekasha, and Tarp (LMT, 2014) criticize our econometric approach, our interpretation, and our data-handling procedure which lead to a large share of missing observations in some...

This article provides a survey of the aid budget literature and examines the determinants of the development aid efforts of 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members over the 1976–2011 period. In fixed effects regressions, we identify aid inertia, per-capita GDP, the creation of an...

The decisions of foreign investors on technical cooperation versus equity engagements and on the degree of ownership in FDI projects are likely to depend on their relative bargaining position vis-à-vis the host country. We perform negative binominal regressions by making use of a unique dataset...

Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives, and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. At the same time, it is open to question whether new...

Summary We analyze the targeting of non-governmental organization (NGO) aid across countries in a multivariate regression framework, based on a dataset for 61 important international NGOs. While our results show that NGOs are more active in the neediest countries, we reject the hypothesis that...

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking,...