By the mid 1990s, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers alike had begun to recognize the critical importance of good governance for growth and poverty reduction. Yet corruption, its mirror image, remained “taboo” at the World Bank up until the historic “cancer of corruption” speech in 1996 of then-Bank President James Wolfensohn that formally brought governance and anticorruption into the ...

The separation of ownership and control in corporations opens up the potential for moral hazard. Thus it is conventional wisdom that managers who are not closely monitored pursue personal goals rather then maximize shareholder wealth. Yet little is known about what these goals are, despite the importance of understanding manager behavior when designing corporate governance rules. This paper pro...

Despite anecdotal evidence that the quality of governance in recipient countries affects the allocation of international health aid, there is no quantitative evidence on the magnitude of this effect, or on which dimensions of governance influence donor decisions. We measure health-aid flows over 1995-2006 for 109 aid recipients, matching aid data with measures of different dimensions of governa...

The separation of ownership and control in corporations opens up the potential for moral hazard. Thus it is conventional wisdom that managers who are not closely monitored pursue personal goals rather than maximize shareholder wealth. Yet little is known about what these goals are, despite the importance of understanding manager behavior when designing corporate governance rules. This paper pro...