The recent focus on impact evaluation within development economics has lead to increased pressure on aid agencies to provide "hard evidence", i.e. results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), to motivate how they spend their money. In this paper I argue that even though RCTs can help us...

We argue that the nature of aid flows early on in a bilateral partnership may be different from that at a later stage. Commercial and strategic interests may carry particular weight after a significant regime change when new relationships need to be established, whereas development concerns come...

Despite a voluminous literature on the topic, the question of whether foreign aid leads to growth is still controversial. To observe the pure effect of aid, researchers used instruments that must be exogenous to growth and explain well aid flows. This paper argues that instruments used in the...