Search
Now showing items 1-10 of 42
Measuring aid effectively in tests of aid effectiveness
In the extensive empirical literature on aid effectiveness, aid is always measured as a share of GDP. However, measuring aid in real dollars per capita is also consistent with standard growth theory. We show that the choice ...
What Explains Changes in the Level of Abuse Against Civilians during the Peruvian Civil War?
Using a new monthly time-series data set, we explore the factors associated with variations in the number of civilians killed or wounded by participants in the civil war in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that an ...
Understanding the Etiology of Electoral Violence: The Case of Zimbabwe
Recent theoretical and empirical work indicates that incumbent governments are likely to attempt to influence election outcomes by violent means (rather than by bribery and fraud) when their level of popular support is ...
Ethnic Fractionalization, Governance and Loan Defaults in Africa
We present a theoretical model of moral hazard and adverse selection in an imperfectly competitive loans market that is suitable for application to Africa. The model allows for variation in both the level of contract ...
Does Aid Work for the Poor?
This paper econometrically examines the impact of aid on the well-being of population sub-groups within 48 developing countries. This is a radical departure from previous empirical research of aid effectiveness at the ...
Cows and conquistadors: a comment on the colonial origins of comparative development
Robust estimation of the impact of political institutions on economic development requires the identification of valid instruments for institutional quality. Acemoglu et al. [2001] introduced the use of colonial settler ...
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." A study of political violence and counter-insurgency in Egypt
This paper analyses a newly collected time-series database measuring the dimensions of violent political conflict in Egypt. Attention is focused on the interaction between politically motivated attacks by Islamists and the ...
Credit Booms, Financial Fragility and Banking Crises
Recent evidence indicates that surges in capital inflows and credit booms can increase the probability of a subsequent banking crisis. Using a new country-level panel database on financial fragility, we take this analysis ...
Mapping Medieval and Modern Chauvinism in England
There is evidence for the long-run persistence of geographical variation in tolerance towards other ethnicities. However, existing studies of tolerance use data from countries with long-standing patterns of ethnic diversity, ...
Education spending and Wagner’s law: New international evidence
This paper examines the association between economic development and two measures of public spending on education, namely the ‘national effort’ (total spending as a percentage of GDP) and ‘budget share’ (total spending as ...