Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

This article empirically investigates whether, and in which ways, donors in the Development Assistance Committee respond to transnational terrorist incidents and the onset of the War on Terror through changes in aid effort and aid allocation. First, an analysis of 22 donor countries shows that...

This paper explores the role of information transmission in explaining donors’ choice between project aid and budget support. Budget support increases the involvement of recipient governments in the decision-making process and can thus be an example of a “delegation-scheme.” Conversely,...

This paper explores the role of information transmission in explaining donors\' choice between project aid and budget support. Budget support increases the involvement of recipient governments in the decision-making process and can thus be an example of a “delegation-scheme\". Conversely,...

This article provides a survey of the aid budget literature and examines the determinants of the development aid efforts of 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members over the 1976–2011 period. In fixed effects regressions, we identify aid inertia, per-capita GDP, the creation of an...

How big is China’s aid to Africa? Does it complement or undermine the efforts of traditional donors? China releases little information, and outside estimates of the size and nature of Chinese aid vary widely. In an effort to overcome this problem, AidData, based at the College of William and...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors’ aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More...

Over time, the international development community has advocated various development paradigms, but countries following these paradigms have often performed poorly. We provide an explanation for this poor performance. In our model, the political leader of a developing country chooses a policy...

China’s development finance is sizable but reliable information is scarce. To address critical information gaps, we introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000-2011....