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Politics and IMF Conditionality
(2013)KOF Working PapersBailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather weak stringency. Obstacles to testing this hypothesis include finding a measure of political importance that is not plagued by endogeneity and ...Working Paper -
The Role of Country-of-origin Characteristics for Foreign Direct Investment and Technical Cooperation in Post-reform India
(2011)KOF Working PapersThe decisions of foreign investors on technical cooperation versus equity engagements and on the degree of ownership in FDI projects are likely to depend on their relative bargaining position vis-à-vis the host country. India provides an interesting case for analyzing the interplay between country-of origin-characteristics and host-country-characteristics and their respective effects on ownership decisions since opening up its economy to ...Working Paper -
Does Membership on the UN Security Council Influence IMF Conditionality?
(2010)KOF Working PapersWe investigate whether elected members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), analyzing panel data on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the period of 1992 to 2008. We find a negative relationship: Security Council members receive about 30 percent fewer conditions attached to the loans that they receive ...Working Paper -
Are ‘New’ Donors Different? Comparing the Allocation of Bilateral Aid between Non-DAC and DAC Donor Countries
(2010)KOF Working PapersMajor DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. On the other hand, new donors (many of which were aid recipients until recently) may have competitive advantages in allocating aid according to need and merit. Project-level data on aid by new donors, ...Working Paper -
Aid Allocation by German NGOs
(2010)KOF Working PapersUsing a new dataset for 41 German non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we analyze the allocation of NGO aid across recipient countries in a Tobit regression framework. By identifying for each NGO the degree of public refinancing, we address the largely unresolved issue of whether financial dependence on the government impairs the targeting of NGO aid. It turns out that German NGOs are more active in poorer countries, while they do not ...Working Paper -
On the Relation Between Income Inequality and Happiness: Do Fairness Perceptions Matter?
(2009)KOF Working PapersIn this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived fairness will experience higher levels of life-time utility and are less in favor of income redistribution. In societies with a high level of actual ...Working Paper -
The impact of aid on growth revisited
(2009)KOF Working PapersThe typical identification strategy in aid effectiveness studies assumes donor motives do not influence the impact of aid on growth. We call this homogeneity assumption into question, first constructing a model in which donor motives matter and then testing the assumption empirically.Working Paper -
Agency and communicaton in IMF conditional lending: Theory and empirical evidence
(2009)KOF Working PapersWe focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed optimal. To the contrary, when local knowledge is more important than the agency bias we expect delegation to dominate. Controlling for economic and ...Working Paper -
Country or leader? Political change and UN general assembly voting
(2009)KOF Working PapersIn this project we explore the relationship between leader change and relations between states. Voting in the United Nation's General Assembly (UNGA) is often used as a measure of political proximity between countries. We use UN voting coincidence to examine how changes in leadership affect relations. Specifically, we examine how political change affects a country's voting with the United States. In this paper we explore how leadership ...Working Paper -
Acting autonomously of mimicking the state and peers?
(2009)KOF Working PapersNGO 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 Swiss NGOs. The analysis offers new insights in two major regards: First, we cover the allocation of both self-financed and officially co-financed aid ...Working Paper