not the subsequent increases. For a small number of loans, reported total disbursements exceed initial commitments by several multiples. To avoid data entry errors that may be responsible for such implausibly high disbursements relative to original commitments, I drop a further 194 loans for which accumulated disbursements are more than five times the initial commitment amount.<sup>10</sup> As a final step, I discard 10 loans that are implausibly large relative to recipient country GDP but have very low disbursement rates, again because these possibly reflect data entry errors. This results in a sample of 59,184 loans on which my results are based.<sup>11</sup> As noted earlier, a key feature of these loans from official creditors is that disbursements are typically spread out over several years following the loan commitment. This is apparent from Figure 1, which reports typical disbursement profiles, i.e. the fraction of the initial loan commitment that is disbursed in year zero (i.e. the year the loan was approved) and the ten subsequent years. The top panel reports the simple average disbursement profile, averaging across all loans in my dataset, while the bottom panel reports disbursement profiles separately for loans issued by bilateral and multilateral lenders. Taking all loans together, on average only 22% of the initial loan commitment is disbursed in the year the loan is approved, and only another 18% in the next year, with the remaining 60% spread out over subsequent years. Disbursement profiles are even more strongly backloaded for multilateral creditors than for bilaterals. The average multilateral loan disburses only 13% of the original commitment in the approval year, while for the average bilateral loan the figure is 29%. These long disbursement profiles in turn imply that actual aggregate disbursements on loans from official creditors in a given country-year are largely associated with past loan commitments, and not loans approved in the current year. In the median country-year observation in my full sample of 102 countries over the period 1970-2010, 89% of disbursements are associated with loans approved in previous years. For the 25th and 75th percentiles, the corresponding figures are 72% and 99%.

Nevertheless, as discussed in the previous section, even these disbursements on previouslyapproved loans might still be endogenous responses to contemporaneous shocks, to the extent that the disbursement decision in the current year reflects current shocks rather than being predetermined at

> 10 Anecdotally, another potential explanation for this pattern is that occasionally loans take the form of revolving credit lines that can be drawn upon and paid down multiple times.  In this case the maximum loan amount is recorded as the loan commitment, and subsequent multiple drawings are recorded as disbursements and can easily exceed the recorded commitment amount.  Unfortunately, however, the DRS database does not systematically identify such credit lines.

> 11 This strategy is conservative in the sense that if I exclude valid loans using these criteria, this will only weaken my first-stage relationship between changes in predicted disbursements and changes in government spending.

12