Aid by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is still widely believed to be superior to official development assistance (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of...

NGO aid is still widely believed to be superior to official aid (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of NGO aid by performing panel Tobit estimations for...

The regional allocation of aid within recipient countries has been largely ignored in the aid allocation literature. We use geocoded data on the location of aid projects financed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank within a sample of 27 recipient countries to assess the claim of...

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional...

The targeting of foreign aid within recipient countries is largely unexplored territory. We help close this gap in empirical research on aid allocation by employing Poisson estimations on the determinants of the World Bank’s choice of project locations at the district level in India. The...

We assess the determinants of the wide variation in the efficiency of foreign aid activities across US-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In particular, we analyze whether non-charitable expenditures for administration, management and fundraising depend on the intensity of competition...

Political proximity between donor and recipient governments may impair the effectiveness of aid by encouraging favoritism. By contrast, political misalignment between donor and recipient governments may render aid less effective by adding to transaction costs and giving rise to incentive...

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and – less robustly – commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political...