Research

Publications

Jud, Stefano and Anthony Luongo. “My House, My Rules: Chinese Aid, Leader Birth Regions, and the Encroachment of Protected Areas.” Review of International Organizations. Preprint

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Foreign-funded development projects have long come into conflict with environmental protection efforts, including by encroaching on protected areas (PAs). We investigate the conditions under which countries are more likely to allow foreign aid projects to infringe on PAs. Drawing on the selective enforcement literature, we hypothesize that leaders are more likely to permit incursions into PAs when projects are located in their home region, as local beneficiaries can translate the resulting rents into political support for the incumbent, while the risk of substantial public backlash over environmental violations is comparatively muted. Using geocoded data on 3,675 Chinese infrastructure projects, we find no overall increase in PA encroachments associated with leaders’ birth regions. However, the aggregate null masks a positive association in Africa, where projects placed in a leader’s birth region are roughly 10 percentage points more likely to encroach on PAs than projects outside the birth region. This association is concentrated in a few countries and in energy, mining, and industry projects. Exploratory analyses suggest that domestic public opinion toward China and the political salience of ethnicity moderate this effect. We find no analogous effect for World Bank projects.

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

• “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)