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...

"Based on qualitative, country-based fieldwork in Eastern and Southern Africa, Antoinette Handley examines how African businesses can be key responders to wider social and political crises, often responding well in advance of the state. She reveals the surprising ways in which business responses...

The last few decades witnessed a dramatic change in public opinion towards gay people. This paper studies the hypothesis that the AIDS epidemic was a shock that changed the incentive to "come out" and that the ensuing process of mobilization and endogenous political process led to cultural...

We assess the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) of multinational oil companies (MOCs) on HIV/AIDS prevalence in Nigeria ' s oil producing communities. One thousand, two hundred households were sampled across the rural communities of Niger Delta. Using logit model, the main result...

We investigate the impact of health aid on infant mortality conditional on the quality of governance in 96 recipient countries. Our analysis applies the long difference estimator and instrumental variable estimation, with aid instrumented by donor government fractionalization interacted with the...

Many practical and action-oriented international roadmaps to improve the quality of aid and its delivery and impact on development-including the Paris Declaration, Accra Agenda for Action, and Busan Partnership-emphasize a more active involvement of domestic institutions and procedures. Despite...

Twelve percent of the Malawian population is HIV infected. Eighteen percent of sexual encounters are casual. A condom is used a third of the time. To analyze the Malawian epidemic, a choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model is constructed. In the developed framework, people select...

This paper analyzes the determinants behind the spatial distribution of the sex industry in Thailand. We relate the development of the sex industry to an early temporary demand shock, i.e., U.S. military presence during the Vietnam War. Comparing the surroundings of Thai military bases used by...

A four-period game is developed between a policy maker, the international community, and the population. This research supplements, through implementing strategic interaction, earlier research analyzing "one player at a time". The first two players distribute funds between preventing and...

Aid allocation studies typically find considerable heterogeneity in donors’ allocation patterns; be it for total Official Development Assistance (ODA) or sector-specific aid. This paper investigates the underlying factors influencing donors’ selection and actual allocation decisions for...

The impact of sex education on various behavioral outcomes has been well studied in the literature. However, these studies fail to account for the simultaneity between knowledge demand and sexual behavior, leading to inconsistent effect estimates using simple comparison of means from randomized...

We study the impact of expert reviews on the demand for HIV treatments. A novel feature of our study is that we observe two reviews for each HIV drug and focus attention on consumer responses when experts disagree. Reviews are provided by both a doctor and an activist in the HIV lifestyle...

Despite the increasing rate of diffusion of effective therapies, the battle against HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is far from being over. Three main challenges are that the epidemics might paralyse or reverse the fertility transition, the expansion of the resources needed to finance the...