This paper considers the impact of foreign aid flows on the risk of civil conflict. We improve on earlier studies on this topic by addressing the problem of the endogenous aid allocation using GDP levels of donor countries as instruments. A more structural addition to the literature is that we...

Recent literature typically finds a U shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age. Age profiles, however, are not identified without forcing arbitrary restrictions on the cohort and/or time profiles. In this paper we report what can be identified about the relationship between life...

Civil wars critically hinder a country's development process. This paper shows that civil wars can also have severe international consequences. Anecdotal evidence highlights that civil wars sometimes spill over international boundaries. Using a more rigorous econometric approach we provide...

Indonesia consistently fares poorly on the international tests like PISA and TIMSS. To help diagnosing the causes of poor learning we track student achievement across 9 years in basic education. We find that 40 percent of students do not learn the basics in the early grades of primary school...

Improving the quality of education is one of today's main challenges for governments in the developing world. Based on a unique matched student-to-teacher panel data set on test scores this paper presents two empirical results for Indonesia. First, through detailed inspection of teacher-level...

Indonesia consistently fares poorly on the international tests like PISA and TIMSS. To help diagnosing the causes of poor learning we track student achievement across 9 years in basic education. We find that 40 percent of students do not learn the basics in the early grades of primary school...

A frequently employed test on the validity of the life cycle model is based on the orthogonality conditions implied by the first order condition of the problem: the Euler equation of consumption (Hall 1978). These tests usually rely on arbitrary assumptions on functional form, and hence, test...

Recent literature typically finds a U shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age. Age profiles, however, are not identified without forcing arbitrary restrictions on the cohort and/or time profiles. In this paper we report what can be identified about the relationship between life...