This paper develops a two-period-two-country model in which an altruistic donor faces Samaritan’s Dilemma to address two important policy questions: (i) whether foreign aid can lead to efficient level of capital investment in the recipient country and (ii) how do the form (e.g. budgetary transfers, capital transfer) and the timing of aid affect the incentives of the recipient? It finds that the...

The vast majority of scholarship on foreign aid looks at either the effectiveness of foreign aid or why particular countries receive aid from particular donors. This paper takes a different approach: what are the domestic sources of support for foreign aid? Specifically, how does the donor’s domestic political and economic environment influence ‘aid effort’? This paper uses a time-series cross-...