Im Januar 2017 stellte Bundesminister Dr. Gerd Müller die Eckpunkte für den Marshallplan mit Afrika vor. Statt weiter Geld nach dem Gießkannenprinzip zu verteilen, soll zukünftig der Aufbau stabiler Wirtschaftsstrukturen gezielt gefördert und die Eigenverantwortung der Regierungen gestärkt...

The bulk of International Finance Corporation (IFC) lending benefits companies from rich countries, and projects in countries with middle income. Large conglomerates such as Lidl or Mövenpick have been among its direct beneficiaries. This contrasts to some extent with the IFC’s official...

This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that...

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 article analyzes 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 country’s aid receipts on both...

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...

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypotheses are tested for a cross-section of 120 countries and...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

We investigate whether and to what extent Chinese development finance affects infant mortality, combining 92 demographic and health surveys (DHS) for a maximum of 53 countries and almost 55,000 sub-national locations over the 2002-2014 period. We address causality by instrumenting aid with a set...

We study the extent to which migrant inflows to the United States affect the political polarization of campaign donors and the ideology of politicians campaigning for the House of Representatives in the 1992-2016 period. Implementing various polarization measures based on ideology data derived...