Research

Publication

Luongo, Anthony. 2026. “Playing Hard to Get: Strategic Signaling in Aid Bargaining.” International Studies Quarterly 70(3). Link

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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.

Working papers

• “My House, My Rules: Chinese Aid, Leader Birth Regions, and the Violation of Protected Areas” (with Stefano Jud). Invited to revise and resubmit at Review of International Organizations.

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  Existing research highlights that Chinese foreign aid is often vulnerable to elite capture in recipient countries. This study examines whether elite capture negatively impacts environmental protection. Specifically, we investigate the enforcement of protected areas (PAs) and assess the extent to which the placement of Chinese aid projects within PAs is shaped by whether a project benefits local economic interests in a political leader’s birth region. We theorize that leaders are more willing violate PAs if the project is placed in their home region than if it is located in a non-home region because the interests that benefit from the aid project in the home region use their new rents to support the incumbent. Analyzing a dataset of 3,675 Chinese infrastructure projects, we find no overall increase in the likelihood of projects infringing on PAs due to a leader's birth region. However, the results reveal significant regional variation. In Africa, projects located in a leader’s birth region are approximately 10 percent more likely to encroach on PAs than projects outside of the leader's birth region. Outside Africa, this relationship is reversed, with projects less likely to violate PAs when placed in a leader’s home region. Exploratory analyses suggest that domestic public opinion about China and the political salience of ethnicity may explain this regional difference. No such effect exists for World Bank projects.

• “Small State Influence at the IMF Executive Board.” Job market paper. Under review.

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  In recent years, small states have agitated, with increasing success, for increased formal representation in decision-making bodies within salient international organizations (IOs). Existing literature has primarily focused on how powerful states influence IO operations, while generally downplaying the ability of small states to overcome great power dominance. This paper explores how small states leverage institutional opportunities to benefit from IOs, taking the case of the International Monetary Fund. I argue that institutionally empowered small states accede to great power dominance at the IMF in exchange for concessions on their highest priority: influence over their own loans. To test this argument, I leverage plausibly exogenous variation in small state representation on the IMF's Executive Board, which manages the Fund's day-to-day activities. Statistical results establish that formal representation increases the count of total conditions. Additional analyses demonstrate that conditions that weaken labor's collective action capacity and increase the popularity of IMF programs see the largest increases.

• “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

“Allies or Technocrats? Small State Appointments to the IMF Executive Board”

“Aid-for-Policy and Aid-for-Allies”

“Executive Preferences over Gender and Aid Allocation” (with Stefano Jud)