Abstract We examine the ‘institutional configuration’ that makes land titles work as collateral in Tanzania’s nascent credit market, through work’ of local lenders. This is effective and precarious: while lenders seek out create institutional complementarities across diverse domains, they also require higher-level regulation to help stabilise titles’ fungibility collateral. Our results contribu...

This paper examines the link between foreign aid and the composition of government spending in aid-recipient countries. Two questions are addressed: (i) does foreign aid crowd out government spending in aid-recipient countries, and (ii) does the degree of fungibility vary across different categories of aid? Using a panel dataset of 67 countries for 1972-2000 we find that at the aggregate level ...

It should not be assumed that earmarked donor funding automatically increases the allocation of developing-country resources towards programmes that yield the greatest health benefits. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not--how the funding is designed can influence this. This is true particularly in the longer term, once the earmarked funding has ended. Even in the short term, total funding ...

We investigate the effects of different forms and sources of income (labor, asset, welfare, and other transfers) and wealth (home equity and other wealth) on household charitable donations (total, religious, secular, combined causes, and the needy) using data from the philanthropy module of the PSID. There are significant differences among income and wealth elasticities from each source. Thus w...

We analyze capability-seeking aspects of foreign direct investment by examining the relationship between upstream (technological) and downstream (marketing) capabilities and the choice between acquisition and greenfield modes of international entry. In analyzing 2,175 entries by British, German and Japanese investors into the United States, we find that for downstream capabilities, which tend n...

When parties are very unequally endowed, agreement may be very difficult to reach, even if the specific transaction is easy to contract on, and fungible resources can be transferred to compensate the losing party. The very fungibility of the resource transferred makes it hard to restrict its use, changing the amount the parties involved spend in trying to grab future rents. This spill-over effe...