national cultural distance and cross border acquisition performance previous theoretical research has argued that national cultural distance hinders cross border acquisition performance by increasing the costs of integration this article tests the alternative hypothesis that national cultural distance enhances cross border acquisition performance by providing access to the target s and or the acquirer s diverse set of routines and repertoires embedded in national culture using a multi dimensional measure of national cultural distance and controlling for other effects we examine a sample of 52 cross border acquisitions that took place between 1987 and 1992 and find a positive association between national cultural distance and cross border acquisition performance

evidence on changes in aid allocation criteria have donors changed their aid allocation criteria over the past three decades toward greater selectivity a frequently stated goal of the international development community using data on how 22 donors allocated their bilateral aid among 147 countries over 1970 2004 the article finds that after the fall of the berlin wall in 1989 and especially in the late 1990s bilateral aid responded more to poverty and the quality of the policy and institutional environment in the recipient countries furthermore the sensitivity of aid allocation to the country s size and its debt burden has declined over time these results are robust to different samples and model specifications various econometric techniques and alternative measures of institutional quality while the specific factors causing these changes cannot be identified these presumably include geopolitical and economic concerns and the many changes in the international aid architecture donors still differ greatly in their selectivity this suggests that further multifaceted reforms are needed to ensure even greater selectivity of aid

catalyzing aid the imf and donor behavior in aid allocation the international monetary fund imf has often asserted that its programs encourage aid by signaling policy credibility commonly referred to as aid catalysis our study investigates this claim for sector specific aid and for bilateral and multilateral donors using data on 136 recipient countries for the 1986 2009 period we employ a two part quantitative model to match the donor decision making process consisting of a first stage recipient selection equation and a second stage allocation equation on selected recipients we find strong support that imf programs catalyze aid on aggregate but the evidence varies across different types of aid aid catalysis is stronger and more robust in sectors linked to the imf s core competency areas namely debt related relief and general budget support but weaker and less robust for infrastructure production multisector and humanitarian aid and non existent for health and education across donors imf programs are associated with increases in aid by countries with larger voting shares in the imf such as the united states and japan but less so by countries with few votes or for multilateral agencies this finding is consistent with research in international political economy arguing that the imf s powerful stakeholders drive the organization s decisions and policies taken together our findings emphasize the imf s multi dimensional impact on the global development agenda an erstwhile overlooked factor in studies of aid allocation while refuting the purported positive effects of imf programs on aid for social policy

aid policy and growth in post conflict societies countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice this paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post conflict growth process it is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their first decade of post conflict economic recovery during the 1990s the authors first investigate whether the absorptive capacity for aid is systematically different in post conflict countries they find that during the first three post conflict years absorptive capacity is no greater than normal but that in the rest of the first decade it is approximately double its normal level so ideally aid should phase in during the decade historically aid has not on average been higher in post conflict societies and it has tended to taper out over the course of the decade the authors then investigate whether the contribution of policy to growth is systematically different in post conflict countries and in particular whether particular components of policy are differentially important for this they use the world bank policy rating database the authors find that growth is more sensitive to policy in post conflict societies comparing the efficacy of different policies they find that social policies are differentially important relative to macroeconomic policies however historically this does not appear to have been how policy reform has been prioritized in post conflict societies

structural shifts in aid dependency and fiscal policy in developing countries abstractforeign aid is a sizable source of government financing for several developing countries and its allocation matters for the conduct of fiscal policy this article revisits the fiscal effects of shifts in aid dependency in 59 developing countries from 1960 to 2010 it identifies structural shifts in aid dependency and uses treatment effect methods to assess the fiscal effects of aid it finds that shifts in aid dependency are frequent and have significant fiscal effects in developing countries in addition to the traditional evidences of tax and investment displacement and aid illusion we show that upward shifts and downward shifts in aid dependency have asymmetric effects on fiscal accounts in developing countries large aid inflows undermine tax capacity and public investment while large reductions in aid inflows tend to keep recipients fiscal behaviour intact moreover the tax displacement effect tends to be temporary while the impacts on expenditure items tend to last finally we find tha

looking ahead optimally in allocating aid summary the collier dollar approach to aid allocation among countries has been less than fully embraced by donors even those focused on poverty reduction partly because it conflicts with the approach to aid allocation implied by the millennium development goals these two approaches are shown to be special cases of a more general model of aid allocation in which donors care about future as well as current poverty this model is illustratively applied to data for developing regions adding a poverty decline adjustment to the allocation formulae used by donors could resolve the conflict between the two approaches

did high debts distort loan and grant allocation to ida countries summary we examine the allocation of net loans net transfers and grants to ida countries over the period 1982 2008 focusing on the role of debt and debt sustainability in the decisions of multilateral and bilateral donors we find no evidence of defensive lending but strong evidence of defensive granting a significant negative reaction of net loans to the debt ratio indeed characterizes the decisions of both multilateral and bilateral creditors the impact of lower loans on the budget of debtor countries is however accommodated through higher grants in addition to debt relief these findings are consistent with a substitution of grants for loans and with the new approach to debt sustainability but question the efficiency and selectivity of foreign aid

race and human capital while human capital has been used with some success to analyze recent changes in racial income differences scholars have repeatedly pointed to a major empirical problem that appears to severely limit the historical relevanlce and scope of skill based theories as applied to racial questions the challenge they raise is legitimate put simply if measured skill disparities between the races narrowed throughout the twentieth century why did income ratios first begin to converge in the 1960 s in this paper i address this question relying on some unexploited census data by race on education literacy occupations and income using these data that begin with the 1890 census i present new estimates of agespecific relative income positions of black men for all postslavery birth cohorts in addition to reconciling the apparently inconsistent skill and income series these income ratios offer a very different historical record than many economists believe to have been the case to cite a prominent example gunnar myrdal s classic work 1944 saw the economic position of his contemporary black america not only as dismal but made even more so by its sense of hopelessness given the absence of any hint of progress or change while myrdal s pessimism is understandable it appears that even in his day seeds had long been sown that were already permanently altering and improving the relative economic status of black men

performance and interaction routines in multinational corporation research on multinational corporations mncs has neglected routines despite their importance for the process of coordination and their prominence in organization theory this paper focuses on three aspects of routinization in mncs first the transmission of routines across cultural boundaries in considered second the focus moves to routine interactions between performance teams in mncs third i discuss how such routines contribute to the structuring of complex international systems the conclusion suggests that the mnc may have to recognize that every replica of an existing facility is also an experimental test of taken for granted practices

project appraisal and planning twenty years on this paper discusses the use and usefulness of social cost benefit analysis it briefly recalls the main features of the procedures put forward in the book by the authors and addresses some of the issues that have arisen in theoretical work since the early 1970s particularly the implications of uncertainty an analysis of the value of project appraisal under uncertainty is provided the rise and decline of project appraisal in the world bank and elsewhere is charted and reasons are considered particular attention is given to the difficulty of using shadow prices and to the institutional environment it is argued that evidence from analysis of the world bank s projects is consistent with placing a high value on the process of economic appraisal the costs of appraisal are noted as is the need to avoid excessive complexity the paper argues for the importance of an economic appraisal system and of attending to the incentives that operate in such a system

on the empirics of foreign aid and growth the present paper re examines the effectiveness of foreign aid theoretically and empirically using a standard olg model we show that aid inflows will in general affect long run productivity the size and direction of the impact may depend on policies deep structural characteristics and the size of the inflow the empirical analysis investigates these possibilities overall we find that aid has been effective in spurring growth but the magnitude of the effect depends on climate related circumstances finally we argue that the collier dollar allocation rule should be seriously reconsidered by donor agencies if aid effectiveness is related to climate the usefulness of foreign aid in promoting growth in developing countries has been an area of controversy ever since rosenstein rodan in 1943 advocated for aid to eastern and south eastern europe browsing through successive editions of a leading textbook in development economics provides a telling illustration of how the confidence in aid effectiveness dwindled over the years in the first edition of leading issues in economic development meier 1964 dedicated a full 18 page section to the issue of foreign aid he started out asking how much aid by the time of the sixth edition meier 1995 the treatment of foreign aid had been cut into half and the questions in focus were why official assistance and does aid work in the 2000 edition meier and rauch 2000 foreign aid is not even listed in the index

policy selectivity forgone debt and donor behavior in africa authors assess the dynamics behind the high net resource transfers by donors and creditors to sub saharan african countries analyzing the determinants of overall net transfers for a panel of 37 recipient countries in 1978 98 authors find that country policies mattered little donors especially bilateral donors actually made greater transfers to countries with high debt largely owed to multilateral creditors when policies were bad authors conclude that comprehensive debt relief has the potential though not the certainty to restore selectivity in support of good policies that would make development assistance more effective going forward and increase public support in donor countries

white discrimination in provision of black education plantations and towns abstract we present a model of public provision of education for blacks in two discriminatory regimes white plantation controlled and white yeoman town controlled we show that the ability to migrate to a non discriminating district constrains the ability of both types of regimes to discriminate the model produces time series of educational outcomes for whites and blacks that mimic the behavior seen in post reconstruction south carolina to the onset of the civil rights act it also fits the post world war ii black white income differentials

the u curve adjustment hypothesis revisited a review and theoretical framework the cross cultural adjustment research literature has largely been conducted from an atheoretical perspective when a theoretical framework is imposed the u curve adjustment theory has been the one most commonly used the lack of a comprehensive review of the empirical literature on the u curve adjustment theory has allowed scholars to accept or dismiss the theory on grounds other than that of empirical evidence this paper reviews the empirical literature and proposes a theoretical framework and research agenda for future research on cross cultural adjustment

fairness in the international allocation of development aid this paper assesses the allocative performance of foreign aid donors it does so by identifying the consistency of the share of donor aid allocated to each developing country with these their shares of global poverty a given donor s allocative performance is maximised if the share of its aid to each developing country exactly equals its share of global poverty this is equated with fairness in the international allocation of aid the allocative performance of all donors all bilateral donors all multilateral agencies all non dac donor countries the eu france germany japan the united kingdom and the united states for the years 2010 15 is assessed the best performance is exhibited by all bilateral donors while that for an individual donor is exhibited by the united kingdom non dac donors exhibit the worst performance the paper also identifies which developing countries receive the most and least aid relative to their shares of global poverty

aid allocation rules abstract this paper studies an aid allocation rule used by major development agencies and investigates optimal allocations when recipients are neoclassical economies undergoing transition dynamics when recipients face aid absorption constraints allocations that favor poorer recipients are not always optimal contrary to what is assumed in assessments of donor performance the most quantitatively significant factors that determine the optimal sensitivity to recipient characteristics are the generosity of the aid budget and the extent of absorption constraints in neoclassical recipients aid can only accelerate growth where there is already growth so the optimal rule places little weight on growth and optimality is largely a matter of balancing recipient need against absorption constraints

a needs driven approach to expatriate adjustment and career development a multiple mentoring perspective although effective in improving socialization development and retention in the us domestic context mentoring would likely benefit expatriates and their firms but it remains theoretically underdeveloped in the international context we develop a theory of international mentoring by integrating current perspectives on protean and boundaryless careers with the literature on mentoring and expatriates expatriates need multiple mentors to assist their adjustment and development during the pre departure expatriation and repatriation stages of international assignments we discuss both hierarchical and peer and formal and informal mentoring relationships to delineate which relationships best address specific expatriate needs international mentoring may improve expatriate adjustment development and retention and thus may affect outcomes of international strategy we conclude by discussing implications and avenues for future research

the income lever and the allocation of aid the paper develops a concept and a measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide budget allocations or the allocation of aid the authors call this concept the income lever making use of tax and distributive theory the paper shows how different redistributive criteria correspond to the different normative criteria of the income lever it then constructs various income lever indexes based on these criteria and uses such indexes to rank countries according to their own capacity to reduce poverty as shown in the empirical application this methodology can provide an equitable tool to rank countries or regions when it comes to budget or aid allocations whether it is the allocation of social funds within the european union north north transfers or the allocation of aid from rich to poor countries north south transfers the findings indicate that the allocation of social funds in the european union follows closely the rank that results from the income lever indexes proposed while the allocation of aid to sub saharan african countries does not

dancing to the donors tune policy choice in aid dependent countries current aid rhetoric emphasizes the selective allocation of otherwise unconditional funds in support of the recipients own plans in contrast to the old donor practice of bundling money and policies i show that when recipients have private information policies reflecting their preferences and knowledge might result in such a regime however generous transfers can also induce them to conform to the outcome oriented expectations of donors at the expense of lower aid impact such behaviour is consistent with an abundance of case study evidence moderate disagreements over what the optimal policy is could actually produce better results certain forms of both donor competition and coordination might also eliminate this distortion while a donor concern for need only removes incentives for aid seeking in the least needy countries in summary optimal aid policies are highly context specific and donors should thus concentrate their efforts to practise more informed selectivity

initial conditions at emancipation the long run effect on black white wealth and earnings inequality abstract black white wealth inequality is much greater than black white earnings inequality in the united states the existing empirical literature has not been able to fully explain the wealth gap this paper investigates how much of current black white income and wealth inequality can be explained by initial conditions at emancipation and nearly 100 years of segregated schools a two sector model with group specific human capital accumulation and school expenditure differences can explain the path of black white convergence in earnings over the past 130 years the model also reproduces the fact that black white wealth ratios remain much lower than black white earnings ratios

cultural and language skills as resources for boundary spanning within the mnc we examine the role of cultural and language skills as resources for individuals boundary spanning ability in multinational corporations our combined qualitative and quantitative analysis shows that cultural and language skills influence the extent to which individual boundary spanners perform four functions exchanging linking facilitating and intervening boundary spanners with both cultural and language skills perform more functions than those with only cultural skills and language skills are critical for performing the most demanding functions key boundary spanners have properties that potentially make them not only valuable organizational human capital but also rare and difficult to imitate theoretical and practical implications are discussed

exploring recipient preferences and allocation mechanisms in the distribution of development aid this study uses incentive compatible techniques to obtain valuations of 14 common poverty reduction interventions from probable aid recipients recipients valuations for these interventions are

national culture and expatriate deployment we hypothesize that expatriate deployment is a control function predicted by home country culture dimensions with transaction cost and agency repercussions rather than culture in the aggregate this departure from the traditional conceptualization and measurement of cultural impact also yields a hypothesized asymmetrical effect which is tested for a multi country sample of 236 multinational subsidiaries using multiple measures of national culture hypotheses are supported with assertiveness and power distance confirmed as prime predictors of expatriate deployment

can the world cut poverty in half how policy reform and effective aid can meet international development goals abstract poverty in the developing world will decline by about one half by 2015 if the trends of the 1990s persist most of this poverty reduction will occur in asia however while poverty will decline only slightly in africa effective aid could make a contribution to greater poverty reduction in lagging regions even more potent would be significant policy reform in these countries we develop a model of efficient aid in which flows respond to policy improvements that create a better environment for poverty reduction and effective aid we investigate scenarios of policy reform and efficient aid that point the way to how the world can cut poverty in half in every major region

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

can poor countries lobby for more us bilateral aid summary this article explores if countries can lobby the us government for the allocation of us bilateral foreign aid we consider an informational lobby model where lobbying has two effects first a direct effect by informing us policymakers about their countries needs second an indirect effect on policymakers by informing them about common interests in economic or geopolitical terms the lobbyist thus influences the decisions about the allocation of aid resources we estimate the effect of the recipient country s lobbying agents in obtaining foreign aid the econometric results show that lobbying positively affects the amount of bilateral aid received

information transmission and ownership consolidation in aid programs we investigate the degree of leeway donors of foreign aid should grant to recipient governments when their preferences over how to implement the aid are different and both the donor and recipient possess some private information about the most effective policies intuitively our model shows that donors should stay in control of how their aid is spent when their own private information is more important than the private information of the recipient less obviously an increase in the difference of preferences between donors and recipients can increase rather than decrease the leeway that donors should grant the recipients as the recipients information gains in importance relative to those of the donors and recipients become less likely to communicate truthfully we test the model using dyadic data for 28 bilateral aid donors and 112 recipients over the 1995 2010 period our proxy for centralized aid is project aid while budget aid leaves more leeway to the recipient and thus proxies for decentralized aid in line with the model misaligned interests and informational asymmetries indeed influence the shares of aid given as budget and project aid jel c23 d82 f33 o1

do developing country wto members receive more aid for trade aft since the world trade organization wto doha development agenda dda negotiations started in 2001 the importance of aid for trade aft has been well recognised as a useful tool for facilitating trade economic growth and social development in developing countries at the wto hong kong ministerial conference in december 2005 the aft initiative was launched and many high income member countries pledged to increase their aft contributions particularly for the least developed member countries ldc this paper aims to assess whether and to what extent the wto s developing member countries have received more aft for this purpose a system generalised method of moments is applied to a sample of 118 recipient countries for the period 2001 10 we find evidence that while ldc wto members on average receive relatively more aft than other developing countries the difference has not increased since launch of the aft initiative among the three categories of aft the positive wto membership effect for ldc members increased for building productive capacity and for trade policy and regulation but declined for infrastructure

donor competition for aid impact and aid fragmentation we show that donors that maximize relative aid impact spread their budgets across many recipient countries in a unique nash equilibrium this aid fragmentation result is robust to the introduction of fixed costs even if they are improbably large in equilibrium smaller donors have less fragmented aid and behave better from an efficiency viewpoint we present evidence that our theoretical results are in line with cross country correlations our analysis has important policy implications first short of ending donors maximization of relative aid impact agreements to better coordinate aid allocations are not implementable second since policies to increase donor competition in terms of aid effectiveness risk reinforcing relativeness they may well backfire as any such reinforcement increases aid fragmentation

the effect of national culture on the choice of entry mode characteristics of national cultures have frequently been claimed to influence the selection of entry modes this article investigates this claim by developing a theoretical argument for why culture should influence the choice of entry two hypotheses are derived which relate culture to entry mode choice one focusing on the cultural distance between countries the other on attitudes towards uncertainty avoidance using a multinomial logit model and controlling for other effects the hypotheses are tested by analysing data on 228 entries into the united states market by acquisition wholly owned greenfield and joint venture empirical support for the effect of national culture on entry choice is found

individual organizational work and environmental influences on expatriate turnover tendencies an empirical study foreign postings for executives are costly undertakings for multinational corporations especially when they fail yet little research has been done on the causes of expatriate turnover this 155 expatriate survey assesses individual organizational work and environmental influences on both internal and external turnover tendencies it was found that job autonomy and material life satisfaction were key predictors for both internal and external turnover tendencies only for organizational turnover did job autonomy supersede material life satisfaction as the lead predictor of turnover tendencies american expatriates attach much importance to maintaining living standards in postings to foreign locations

global samaritans donor election cycles and the allocation of humanitarian aid abstract this paper finds a large causal donor election cycle effect in humanitarian aid allocations on average humanitarian aid increases by 19 in the year before elections our identification strategy consists of focusing on donors with fixed election dates making elections clearly exogenous furthermore we find large interaction effects with natural and human disasters this evidence is consistent with our theory that incumbent governments responding to humanitarian disasters can increase voter support for their party and insure against the political fall out of not being seen as representatives of a country with global interests and influence however it is important to stress that despite our findings human and natural disasters explain a substantially larger share of the overall variation in humanitarian aid observed in the data

public information and performance the role of spatial dependence in the worldwide governance indicators among african countries summary the worldwide governance indicators wgi provide transparent and comparable country statistics for different dimensions of governance linked to under development yet does the public availability of governance data actually enhance performance if investors donor agencies and citizens are made aware of relative governance performance competition for inward investment such as fdi and oda and domestic legitimacy become plausible mechanisms for diffusion of good governance we test whether such mechanisms operate using the wgi for africa and find evidence for spatial diffusion of democracy rule of law and corruption control there is no evidence for diffusion of regulatory quality and government effectiveness

multinational corporations control systems and delegation issues the paper has 2 major objectives first to identify control and delegation issues confronting multinational corporation managers second to develop a conceptual model to assist multinational corporation managers in selecting appropriate control systems and determining the extent of delegation to be provided to subsidiary managers finally the paper suggests directions for future research

values schemas and norms in the culture behavior nexus a situated dynamics framework international business ib research has predominantly relied on value constructs to account for the influence of societal culture notably hofstede s cultural dimensions while parsimonious the value approach s assumptions about the consensus of values within nations and the generality and stability of cultural patterns of behavior are increasingly challenged we review two promising alternatives the constructivist approach centering on schemas and the intersubjectivist approach centering on norms and the evidence that demonstrates their usefulness in accounting for international differences in the behavior of managers employees and consumers we propose a situated dynamics framework specifying the role of values schemas and norms in accounting for cultural differences and delineating conditions under which each causal mechanism is operative values play a more important role in accounting for cultural differences in weak situations where fewer constraints are perceived schemas play a more important role when situational cues increase their accessibility and relevance and norms play a more important role when social evaluation is salient directions for future research based on this integrative framework and its implications for the measurement of culture and application in ib are discussed

where do the poor live this paper argues that the distribution of global poverty has changed and that most of the world s poor no longer live in countries officially classified as low income countries lics it is estimated that the majority of the world s poor or up to a billion people live in middle income countries mics this pattern is largely as a result of the recent graduation into the mic category of a number of populous countries the paper discusses the trends in the distribution of global poverty and opens a wider discussion on the potential implications for aid and development cooperation

the role of expatriates in the management of interdependence complexity and risk in multinational corporations a multilevel analysis of environmental country and organizational affiliate factors is used to explain the differential utilization rates of u s nationals in overseas professional positions of a major u s bank with 84 branches in 43 countries the research suggests that to the extent that the affiliates of a multinational corporation operate in environments with differing levels of political risk cultural distance and competition and have operations with different levels of complexity and interdependence a single staffing policy may be inappropriate

darlings and orphans interactions across donors in international aid we examine how bilateral aid flows of an individual donor to a recipient depend on aid flows from all other bilateral and multilateral donors to that recipient we thereby assess to what extent issues including donor coordination free riding selectivity specialization and common donor interests drive bilateral aid allocations we find that others bilateral flows lead to a significant increase in aid flows from a particular donor but primarily within a given year the effects are particularly pronounced for large donors and so called darling recipients overall the results suggest that herding is a dominant feature of aid inter relationships this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

race and human capital comment according to human capital theory changes in the racial schooling gap are a key factor in the historical evolution of blackwhite male income ratios in a recent paper in this review 1984 james smith points out a basic paradox in the human capital explanation race differences in years of schooling have diminished sharply and continuously for male cohorts born in the twentieth century black white male income ratios however rose only slightly in the aggregate before 1960 after 1960 the ratios increased appreciably smith resolves the paradox by constructing new estimates of the racial schooling gap for cohorts stretching back to the civil war based on retrospective educational attainment data from the 1940 and subsequent censuses race differences in years of schooling widened among males born from 1886 to 1910 additionally the quality of black schooling fell relative to the quality of white schooling since these cohorts dominate the census occupation and income statistics until 1960 smith claims the relative constancy of black white income ratios until 1960 is consistent with the human capital model this comment challenges one of smith s conclusions the increase in the racial schooling gap is shown to be spurious scholars often interpret census attainment data as a measure of years of schooling but the data refer to highest grade completed historically the average black pupil took longer than a single school year to complete a grade retention alone would not bias the census attainment data most blacks born in the late nineteenth century however were educated in ungraded schools for them census attainment data measure years of schooling not grades the shift from ungraded to graded schools took place throughout the period of educational retrogression identified by smith it is the change from years to grades that causes black schooling levels to appear to lag behind white schooling levels consistent data show a continuously decreasing racial schooling gap whatever the merit of smith s explanation it cannot rest on census attainment data beginning in 1890 the u s bureau of the census reported school attendance rates for narrow age groups for example ages 5 to 9 1 i use these data to construct new estimates of average years of schooling in the following manner let p j proportion of children of age j at school a e minimum age at entering school and a l maximum age at leaving school i assume that a e 5 and a l 20 since attendance rates before age 5 or after age 20 were negligible for the period because data are unavailable for single years of age i also assume the agespecific attendance rates are equal to the average attendance rate for the relevant age 2 j a l group the sum ej a e p j estimates average years of schooling 3 empirically the number of students who skip a grade is less than the number who fail the grade hence average years of schooling should exceed average highest grade completed table 1 presents the cohort specific estimates of years of schooling according to my calculations the racial schooling gap fell from 3 8 years among 1886 90 cohorts to 2 5 years among 1906 10 cohorts according

aid infrastructure and fdi assessing the transmission channel with a new index of infrastructure official development assistance oda and foreign direct investment fdi are widely perceived to be alternative means of supplementing domestic savings and promoting economic development in low and middle income countries however possible complementarities of aid and fdi have received limited attention so far it remains open to debate whether aid could render recipient countries more attractive to fdi by removing specific bottlenecks that prevent higher fdi inflows in particular we raise the hypothesis that aid specifically targeted at economic infrastructure helps developing countries attract higher fdi inflows through improving their endowment with infrastructure in transportation communication energy and finance by performing 3sls estimations we explicitly account for dependencies between three structural equations on the allocation of sector specific aid the determinants of infrastructure and the determinants of fdi we find strong and robust evidence that aid in infrastructure is effective in improving the recipient countries endowment with infrastructure in sharp contrast other aid is not effective in improving infrastructure infrastructure consistently proves to be an important determinant of developing countries attractiveness to fdi consequently only targeted aid promotes fdi indirectly through the infrastructure channel in addition aid in infrastructure has direct effects on fdi it appears that foreign investors anticipate longer term effects of aid on the country s endowment with infrastructure and expect aid financed infrastructure to serve them particularly well

education achievement in segregated school systems the effects of separate but equal educational achievement in segregated school systems was considerably lower in the black schools than in the white schools economic historians have argued that the racial achievement gap reflected the discriminatory funding of the black schools this paper assesses counterfactually the historical effects of a separate but equal policy of educational finance using cross sectional data from 1930 and 1940 i estimate race specific educational production functions eliminating race differences in inputs supplied by school boards explains 40 50 percent of the racial achievement gap depending on how achievement is measured the remainder appears to reflect the impact of family background on achievement of which the most important effect was adult black illiteracy a legacy of slavery and educational backwardness in the late 19th century the paper also shows how school boards marginal valuation of black achievement can be recovered from the production function estimates compared to preferences that would have led them to voluntarily practice equality southern school boards judged black achievement to be worth roughly half the value they placed on white achievement this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the role of governance in determining foreign aid flow composition summary we hypothesize that selective donors will use types of aid over which they have more control when providing assistance to poorly governed countries we use an original classification of project purpose codes in the aiddata dataset to categorize aid flows from the period 2004 to 2010 results from fixed effect and compositional data models provide evidence of selectivity in terms of overall aid flows a tradeoff between technical assistance and programmatic lending and a tradeoff between social sector and infrastructure projects

race and human capital reply to arrive at a tenable interpretation of black history it is important to resolve the conflict between my measure retrospective years of schooling completed and robert margo s measure prospective accumulation across ages of cohort specific attendance rates my series reconciled the apparent inconsistency between the stagnant pre 1940 black white income ratios and what scholars had previously thought was a steady narrowing of racial education differences margo s series not only would restore that incon

repatriation of corporate executives an empirical study the effective management of corporate executives returning from foreign assignments has received little attention from academic researchers this study is based on questionnaires completed by members of the american society of personnel administration international aspi the focus of the study was directed at problems that occurred in repatriating executives programs used by corporations to repatriate returning executives and examines why programs have not been instituted by multinational corporations

the distinction between stable and dynamic cross cultural competencies implications for expatriate trainability existing research fails to distinguish between stable cross cultural c c competencies e g personality traits and dynamic ones yet stable competencies may constrain trainability in the dynamic c c skills that are critical for c c adjustment accordingly this distinction is drawn using black mendenhall s 1990 3 dimensional typology of c c competencies as a framework operationalizations for the c c competencies are suggested the practical and theoretical implications for expatriate management are then discussed

the anarchy of numbers aid development and cross country empirics the recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth aid raises growth in countries with good policies or with difficult economic environments or outside the tropics or on average but with diminishing returns the diversity of the results suggests that many are fragile seven important aid growth papers are tested for robustness using 14 minimally arbitrary tests deriving mainly from differences among the studies themselves this approach investigates the importance of potentially arbitrary specification choices while minimizing the arbitrariness in testing choices all of the results appear fragile especially to sample expansion

aid policies and growth comment in an extraordinarily influential paper craig burnside and david dollar 2000 p 847 find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor policies this finding has enormous policy implications the burnside and dollar 2000 henceforth bd result provides a role and strategy for foreign aid if aid stimulates growth only in countries with good policies this suggests that 1 aid can promote economic growth and 2 it is crucial that foreign aid be distributed selectively to countries that have adopted sound policies international aid agencies public policy makers and the press quickly recognized the importance of the bd findings this paper reassesses the links between aid policy and growth using more data the bd data end in 1993 we reconstruct the bd database from original sources and thus 1 add additional countries and observations to the bd data set because new information has become available since they conducted their analyses and 2 extend the data through 1997 thus using the bd methodology we reexamine whether aid influences growth in the presence of good policies given our focus on retesting bd we do not summarize the vast pre bd literature on aid and growth we just note that there was a long and inconclusive literature that was hampered by limited data availability debates about the mechanisms through which aid would affect growth and disagreements over econometric specification see gustav f papanek 1972 robert cassen 1986 paul mosley et al 1987 peter boone 1994 1996 and henrik hansen and finn tarp s 2000 review since bd found that aid boosts growth in good policy environments there have been a number of other papers reacting to their results including paul collier and jan dehn 2001 carljohan dalgaard and hansen 2001 patrick guillaumont and lisa chauvet 2001 hansen and tarp 2001 robert lensink and howard white 2001 and collier and dollar 2002 these papers conduct useful variations and extensions some of which had already figured in the pre bd literature such as introducing additional control variables using nonlinear specifications etc some of these papers confirm the message that aid only works in a good policy environment while others drive out the aid policy interaction term with other variables this literature has the usual limitations of choosing a specification without clear guidance from theory which often means there are more plausible specifications than there are data points in the sample we differentiate our paper from these others by not deviating from the bd specification thus we do not test the robustness of the results to an unlimited number of variations but instead maintain the bd methodology this paper conducts a very simple robustness check by adding new data that were unavailable to bd thus we expand the sample used over their time period and extend the data from 1993 to 1997 easterly department of economics new york university 269 mercer street new york ny 10003 center for global development and national bureau of economic research e mail william easterly nyu edu levine department of finance carlson school of management university of minnesota 321 19th avenue south minneapolis mn 55455 and national bureau of economic research e mail rlevine csom umn edu roodman center for global development 1776 massachusetts avenue nw washington dc 20036 e mail droodman cgdev org we are grateful to craig burnside for supplying data and assisting in the reconstruction of previous results without holding him responsible in any way for the work in this paper thanks also to francis ng and prarthna dayal for generous assistance with updating the sachs warner openness variable and to three anonymous referees craig burnside and henrik hansen for helpful comments 1 see for instance the world bank 1994 2001 2002 the u k department for international development 2000 president george w bush s speech march 16 2002 the announcement by the white house on creating the millennium challenge corporation white house 2002 as well as a washington post editorial february 9 2002 a financial times column by alan beattie march 11 2002 and the economist march 16 2002

a paradox of redistribution in international aid the determinants of poverty oriented development assistance summary donors differ in the amount of official development assistance dedicated to poverty reduction we investigate the causes of variation over time and donors by employing both a regression approach with aggregate data on bilateral aid and two short country studies on germany and the united kingdom we find that there is a trade off between the total amount of money given and the amount of money given to poor countries the trade off is similar to the paradox of redistribution of targeting vs redistribution in rich welfare states case study evidence illustrates how countries have managed this tradeoff

does aid for trade diversify the export structure of recipient countries the importance of aid for trade as a tool for facilitating trade economic growth and social development has received attention since the concept was introduced in 2005 while one of the main targets of aid for trade is export diversification reflecting the fact that the exports of many developing countries are concentrated in a small range of items there have not been many efforts to measure the effect of aid for trade on export structure this study therefore attempts to trace the relationship between aid for trade and 133 aid recipients export structure between 1996 and 2013 using the herfindahl hirschman index to measure the degree of export concentration the findings suggest that total aid for trade has reduced the concentration level in the short run in the long run on the other hand aid for trade has had no significant effect on export structure of recipient countries only aid for building productive capacity which is one of the three categories of aid for trade contributes to lower concentration yet this change is not caused by an increase in export diversity but by the redistribution of shares of existing products of a similar sophistication level

why donors of foreign aid do not coordinate the role of competition for export markets and political support development assistance has been criticised for a lack of coordination between aid donors this paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from coordinating their aid activities between one another to test these hypotheses we perform logit and fractional logit estimations for a large sample of recipient countries and aid activities since the early 1970s our empirical results reveal that export competition between donors is a major impediment to aid coordination although less conclusive we also find some evidence that donors competition over political support prevents them from coordinating aid activities more closely

longevity and lifetime labor supply evidence and implications conventional wisdom suggests that increased life expectancy had a key role in causing a rise in investment in human capital i incorporate the retirement decision into a version of ben porath s 1967 model and find that a necessary condition for this causal relationship to hold is that increased life expectancy will also increase lifetime labor supply i then show that this condition does not hold for american men born between 1840 and 1970 and for the american population born between 1890 and 1970 the data suggest similar patterns in western europe i end by discussing the implications of my findings for the debate on the fundamental causes of long run growth

is foreign aid concentrated increasingly on needy and deserving recipient countries an analysis of theil indices 1995 2015 abstract in the paris declaration on aid effectiveness of 2005 and related initiatives donor countries promised to render foreign aid more effective inter alia by increasingly concentrating aid on particularly needy recipient countries with relatively good governance in this study we re consider the question of whether bilateral and multilateral donors have adjusted their aid allocation accordingly we track the changes in different margins of theil indices of aid concentration between 1995 2004 and 2006 2015 we do so for the aggregate aid of the two groups of bilateral dac donors and multilateral donors as well as for nine major individual dac donors according to our findings the paris declaration did not change donors aid allocation systematically and consistently overall aid concentration has declined for the two donor groups as well as for the majority of individual dac donors in contrast to multilateral aid bilateral aid has become slightly more concentrated on poorer recipient countries still most donors have become less selective in granting aid to higher income countries furthermore the paris declaration did not help improve the merit based allocation of aid finally there is no compelling evidence suggesting that donors have become less self interested in using aid as a means to promote their own exports these results suggest that commitments to reward better governed recipients and not to misuse aid as an export promotion tool appear to be particularly hard to enforce overall the gap between donor rhetoric and actual aid allocation persists

foreign aid responses to political liberalization this paper analyzes the impact of political liberalization on receipt of foreign aid it distinguishes different types of donors facing different constraints in rewarding democratization with foreign aid notably bilateral donors the world bank and the european commission based on a sample of 174 recipient countries from 1995 to 2009 the paper jointly examines short term dynamics and long term effects of sustained liberalization except for the world bank donors react to regime change bilateral donors are found to reward political liberalization in the second year after transition

aid allocation and poverty reduction the authors derive a poverty efficient allocation of aid and compare it with actual aid allocations they build the poverty efficient allocation in two stages first they use new world bank ratings of 20 different aspects of national policy to establish the current relationship between aid policies and growth onto that they add a mapping from growth to poverty reduction which reflects the level and distribution of income they compare the effects of using headcount and poverty gap measures of poverty they find the actual allocation of aid to be radically different from the poverty efficient allocation in the efficient allocation for a given of poverty aid tapers in with policy reform in the actual allocation aid tapers out with reform in the efficient allocation aid is targeted disproportionately to countries with severe poverty and adequate polices the type of country where 74 percent of the world s poor live in the actual allocation such countries receive a much smaller share of aid 56 percent than their share of the world s poor with the present allocation aid is effective in sustainably lifting about 30 million people a year out of absolute poverty with a poverty efficient allocation this would increase to about 80 million people even with political constraints introduced to keep allocations for india and china constant poverty reduction would increase to about 60 million reallocating aid is politically difficult but it may be considerably less difficult than quadrupling aid budgets which is what the authors estimate would be necessary to achieve the same impact on poverty reduction with existing aid allocations

nationality cultural distance and expatriate status effects on the managerial network in a multinational enterprise we study the role of three characteristics of international managers nationality cultural distance and expatriate status for their network ties a network analysis of cross subsidiary interactions among 457 managers in an mne demonstrates that managers form strong expressive ties with peers with smaller cultural distance and from the same status group however managers form strong instrumental ties with peers who are different on these background characteristics the implications for international management theory and practice are discussed

aid and growth what does the cross country evidence really show abstract we examine the effects of aid on growth in cross sectional and panel data after correcting for the possible bias that poorer or stronger growth may draw aid contributions to recipient co

aid trade and migration how do bilateral flows interact this paper takes as its point of departure the european commission s position set out in 2005 which laid clear emphasis on aid and trade as tools for controlling immigration we attempt to subject this position to empirical investigation we exploit data on bilateral aid trade and migration flows between developed and developing countries for the period 2000 10 adopting an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity issue due to potential simultaneity bias our results establish that increasing aid and trade with developing countries is likely to fail to contain immigration at least in the short run the pattern of results is consistent with the hypothesis that promoting development in migrant sending countries or cooperating with such countries to control migration outflows is not sufficient to lessen immigration increasing visa restrictions and controls at borders is generally controversial still the results imply that policymakers cannot attain their short term immigration goals with the so called smart solutions of aid and trade

the multinational corporation as a multilingual community language and organization in a global context this paper develops a framework for analyzing the multinational corporation mnc as a multilingual community in which parent functional language and subunit functional languages are concurrently used and recursively linked through an intra corporate communication network the unit breadth and intensity of an mnc s language system are designed to apply global strategies within the context of evolving environmental and organizational realities to the extent that language design is the product of deliberate choice we suggest that headquarters functional language is determined by the mnc s international strategy organizational structure and transnationality while subunit functional language is designed in accordance with organizational form strategic role and expatriate deployment aligning language systems with organizational strategy and dynamics improves mnc communication coordination and knowledge sharing

aid and performance a reassessment two visions of aid effectiveness and allocation are compared the first corresponding to the new aid paradigm argues that aid is only effective if domestic policies are appropriate the second in contrast argues that aid effectiveness depends on the external and climatic environment the worse this environment or the more vulnerable the recipient countries the greater the effectiveness of aid cross sectional econometric tests related to gdp growth on two 12 year pooled periods clearly favour the second view the two views can be reconciled through the principle of performance based aid allocation where performance is defined as outcomes adjusted for the impact of environmental factors performance can then be measured in several manners which are subject to comparison one approach would lead one to allocate more aid the worse the external environment is for a given policy and the better the policy is for a given environment