We analyze the growth impact of official development assistance to developing countries. Our approach to this heatedly debated subject is different from that of previous studies in two major ways. First, we disentangle the effects of two components of aid: a developmental, growth-enhancing component, and a geopolitical, possibly growthdepressing component. Second, our specifications allow for the effect of aid on economic growth to occur over long time-lags involving periods of up to several decades. This approach allows us to take account of aid-financed investments in economic infrastructure and human capabilities that can by their nature create returns only over time. Our results indicate that aid of the right kind promotes long-run growth. The effect of developmental aid is significant, large, and withstands a battery of robustness checks including alternative proxies for developmental aid, specifications and treatments of outliers. The paper has important policy implications: it indicates that increasing the level of developmental aid (whether by changing the composition or level of total aid) can have a sizable impact on long-run growth. Furthermore, we find no evidence that there are diminishing returns to aid nor that aid is only effective in "good" policy environments.
We examine the causal impact of the 2002-2007 civil conflict in Côte d'Ivoire on children's health using household surveys collected before, during, and after the conflict, and information on the exact location and date of conflict events. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting both temporal and spatial variation across birth cohorts to measure children's exposure to the conflict. We find that children from regions more affected by the conflict suffered significant health setbacks compared with children from less affected regions. We further examine possible war impact mechanisms using rich survey data on households' experience of war. Our results suggest that conflict-induced economic losses, health impairment, displacement, and other forms of victimization are important channels through which armed conflict negatively impacts child health. Olga Shemyakina would like to thank Georgia Institute of Technology for financial support. We are grateful to the National Statistical Institute and the Ministry of Planning and Development in Côte d'Ivoire for their permission to use the 2002 and 2008 HLSS (Enquêtes sur le Niveau de Vie) for this project. We are grateful to Richard Akresh,
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