Chapter 1: This chapter studies the effects of bilateral foreign aid on conflict escalation and deescalation. We make three major contributions. First, we combine data on civil wars with data on low level conflicts in a new ordinal measure capturing the two-sided and multifaceted nature of...

This article is the first to systematically study whether foreign aid affects the net flows of refugees from recipient countries. Combining refugee data on 141 origin countries over the 1976-2013 period with bilateral Official Development Assistance data, we estimate the causal effects of a...

This thesis consists of four essays on the political economy of foreign aid. These essays cover issues related to the allocation, the timing, and the economic consequences of foreign aid for recipient countries. Chapters 1 and 3 consider the allocation of official development assistance across...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

Natural disasters represent a major challenge for human welfare across the globe. Given the prominent role of international humanitarian aid in alleviating human suffering, the investigation of its determinants is of paramount importance. While existing studies show its allocation to be...

The paper investigates the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Specifically, the paper tests whether the effect of aid on economic growth is reduced by the share of years a country served on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the period the...