Little is known about foreign aid provided by private donors. This paper contributes to closing this research gap by comparing the allocation of private humanitarian aid to that of official humanitarian aid awarded to 140 recipient countries over the 2000-2016 period. We construct a new database...

NGO aid is still widely believed to be superior to official aid (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of NGO aid by performing panel Tobit estimations for...

Previous literature largely ignores the heterogeneity of aid channels used by each single donor country. We estimate Tobit models to assess the relative importance of recipient need, recipient merit and self-interest of donors for various channels of official and private German aid across a...

We assess empirically whether foreign official development assistance (ODA) has been effective in alleviating HIV/AIDS epidemics, which figures prominently among the Millennium Development Goals. We employ a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach to identify the treatment effect of ODA...

NGO aid is still widely believed to be superior to official aid (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of NGO aid by performing panel Tobit estimations for...

The non-distribution constraint of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) would be harder, and financiers as well as recipients could expect more charitable output from them, if less efficient NGOs were squeezed out of international development cooperation. We employ Probit and complementary...

Apart from scaling up foreign aid by NGOs, informed choices of private donors could also encourage an efficient and targeted use of NGO funds in international development cooperation. We assess the determinants of private donations across a large sample of US based NGOs with foreign aid...

We assess whether bilateral and multilateral donors of foreign aid specialized and coordinated their activities with other donors as agreed in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We account for donor heterogeneity, varying aid priorities and recipient characteristics in order to isolate changes in...

We assess the determinants of the wide variation in the efficiency of foreign aid activities across US-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In particular, we analyze whether non-charitable expenditures – i.e., administration, management and fundraising – depend on the intensity of...

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...