Research

Working papers

• “Playing Hard to Get: Strategic Signaling in Aid Bargaining.” Under review.

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  Foreign aid is a political exchange between a donor and target. Existing literature focuses primarily on donors, but less is known about how targets advance their interests. I model the aid exchange using a costly signaling model in which targets send a (potentially misleading) signal of their policy preferences before the donor makes an aid offer. In equilibrium, when the cost of a misleading signal is sufficiently low, targets who are aligned with a donor on policy lie about their alignment at least some of the time, which yields them aid that they would not have received otherwise. After mapping the model into empirical implications, I show that nonresponse in the UN General Assembly – a low-cost signal of nonalignment – is correlated with higher future aid inflows. This argument highlights the role of aid-receiving states as strategic actors who can extract concessions from donors.

• “Strategic Foreign Aid: A Structural Approach” (with Michael Gibilisco, Brenton Kenkel, and Miguel Rueda)

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  The U.S. and China are entering a new era of major-power competition in which foreign aid serves as a tool for contesting global influence. What is the effect of competition on the distribution of aid from China and the U.S. across the globe? While the literature has studied how specific factors (e.g., democracy) affect the amount of foreign aid a country receives, we still do not know whether these factors affect the preferences of the U.S. and China for giving aid directly or indirectly via competition and strategic interaction. In this paper, we answer these questions by adopting a structural approach: we construct a game-theoretic contest model of aid distribution and estimate its parameters given the observed foreign aid commitments of the two countries. The structural approach allows us to (1) estimate the degree to which aid given by one major power to a specific recipient country responds to the expectations of its rival’s aid to the same country; (2) see whether other factors of potential recipient countries (e.g., democracy) moderate the U.S and China's response to each others' aid; and (3) compare a country's observed distribution of aid to the counterfactual distribution that would arise absent competition from its rival.

Works in Progress

“Endogenous Importance in Aid Bargaining”

“Recipient Agency and the IMF Executive Board”

“My House, My Rules: The Placement of Chinese Aid Projects in Protected Areas” (with Stefano Jud)