Leland & Pyle Meet Foreign Aid? Adverse Selection and the Procyclicality of Financial Aid Flows

Official development assistance (grants and subsidized loans from foreign aid agencies) is the main source of external finance in developing countries. These financial aid flows are positively correlated with the recipients' business cycles, which is puzzling because it reinforces already strong and costly macroeconomic fluctuations in the recipient countries. We propose an explanation related to a familiar corporate finance theory of inside equity commitments. We assume that donor agencies and recipient governments value projects differently, and that donors know less than recipients do about projects. We show that donors can make an aid recipient idientify high-return projects by conditioning aid on the recipient's committing some of its own funds to the selected projects. This commitment makes recommending bad projects costly. Contributing "counterpart funds" is more difficult during economic downturns, however - which leads to aid procyclicality. This simple model of investment financing and aid provision produces aid contracts consistent with those used by aid agencies, rationalizes observed aid flow patterns, and yields a rich set of testable empirical predictions.Aid, Altruism, Adverse selection, Counterpart funds, Capital flow procyclicality

FOREIGN AID AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE

In this paper, we document some key business cycle properties of foreign aid flows to developing countries. We identify two striking empirical regularities. First, aid flows are highly volatile over time -- on average, two to three times as volatile as the recipient's output. Second, for most African countries, net aid inflows are strongly positively correlated with their domestic output. Outside of Africa, we find a similar, if somewhat less pronounced, pattern of aid procyclicality.To see why these empirical regularities are important, recall that output fluctuations in developing countries are much stronger than in industrialized economies. Indeed, we document that the gross domestic product of an aid recipient is on average six times as volatile as that of a donor. For developing countries, though, customary ways to smooth out the impact of output fluctuations on domestic consumption are likely to be very onerous. For instance, moral hazard and repudiation risk imply that heavily indebted nations are often denied new loans (or are asked to repay old ones) precisely when their economies suffer adverse shocks -- see, e.g., Atkeson-1991). At the same time, foreign aid is a sizeable source of income to recipients, especially in Africa, where it averages 12.5% of gross domestic product and constitutes the main source of foreign capital. In such an environment, foreign aid flows have the potential to play a key role in smoothing out developing countries' output fluctuations. Our results imply that, all in all, aid does not play that role.Admittedly, it might be argued that, except for emergency relief, the chief purpose of foreign aid is not to act as an insurance device but, instead, to fuel economic development, in which case it is not clear a priori whether one should expect aid flows to be procyclical or countercyclical. It is well known, however, that output fluctuations affect growth negatively -- see, e.g., Hamilton (1989) and Ramey&Ramey (1995). Hence, even if aid were meant solely to help foster growth, serious concerns should nonetheless arise from the fact that aid disbursement patterns contribute to the volatility of developing countries' disposable income.Our findings are robust. Our data set comprises various yearly aid and output series for sixty-three recipient and eighteen donor countries between 1969 and 1995. We find few differences between the cyclical behavior of multilateral as opposed to bilateral aid disbursements, even though multilateral aid flows are relatively more volatile than their bilateral counterparts. Likewise, aid commitments fluctuate more than actual net disbursements, but both commitments and disbursements are procyclical. We also pay special attention to Africa, because it is the region where aid is largest relative to recipient GDP and aid procyclicality is most striking. We show that, regardless of the domestic output measure used, net aid receipts are procyclical for at least two-thirds of the thirty-eight countries in our African subsample and are countercyclical for, at most, two of them. Key components of African aid, such as grants or technical assistance, are as strongly procyclical as total aid flows. Finally, we can find no evidence that, among African countries, the procyclicality of aid might be a function of the recipient's former colonial power, choice of exchange rate regime or some other criterion.We complete the paper by analyzing the cyclical properties of aid flows from the donors' perspective. For almost all donor countries, we find that total aid disbursements are strongly positively correlated with the donor's output. In a clear majority of cases, however, those same donors' bilateral aid flows to the sample countries are not positively correlated with the donor's output. A corollary is that the procyclicality of aid inflows experienced by aid recipients is not the mere result of the conjunction of (i) positive comovements between North-South business cycles [Kouparitsas (1998); Agenor&Prasad (1999)] and (ii) a positive correlation between donors' aid policies and their business cycles.

The Welfare Costs of Macroeconomic Fluctuations under Incomplete Markets: Evidence from State-Level Consumption Data

Existing estimates of the welfare cost of business cycles suggest that it is quite low and might well be minuscule. Many of these estimates are based on aggregated U.S. consumption data. Arguably, because markets are incomplete and risk-sharing is imperfect, the welfare costs computed with aggregate consumption data are likely underestimates. Yet, incomplete-market models have not yielded significantly greater cost figures. Previous incomplete-market studies, however, have relied on model-generated consumption series that reflect optimal decsions in models calibrated using individual income data. In this paper, we maintain the assumption of incomplete markets but use observed consumption streams instead. Using state-level retail sales figures, we show that the welfare cost of macroeconomic volatility is in fact very substantial. In one half of the U.S. states, the welfare gain from the removal of business cycles can in fact exceed the gain from receiving an extra percentage point of consumption growth in perpetuity. In short, our results indicate that macroeconomic volatility has first-order welfare implications.Incomplete markets, consumption volatility, growth, welfare

On the Potential of Foreign Aid as Insurance

In this paper, we argue that it would be fruitful to revisit foreign aid's potential as an insurance mechanism against macroeconomic shocks. In a simple model of aid flows between two endowment economies, we show that at least three fourths of the large welfare costs of macroeconomic fluctuations in poor countries could be alleviated by a simple reallocation of aid flows across time.Foreign aid, Consumption smoothing, Macroeconomic fluctuations, Welfare

The Potential of Foreign Aid as Insurance

This paper quantifies the potential of foreign aid as an insurance mechanism against macroeconomic shocks. Within a dynamic model of aid flows between two endowment economies, we show that at least three-fourths of the large welfare costs of macroeconomic fluctuations in poor countries could be alleviated by a simple reallocation of aid flows across time. In developing countries subject to persistent macroeconomic shocks, the resulting welfare improvement is of first-order magnitude. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund

Penalties and Optimality in Financial Contracts: Taking Stock

A popular view of limited liability in financial contracting is that it is the result of societal preferences against excessive penalties. The view of most financial economists is instead that limited liability emerged as an optimal institution when, in the absence of a clear limit on economic agents liability, the development of some economic activities might have been thwarted. Viewing the institution from the perspective of optimal legal system design allows us to better understand the current debate on it. We present a broad history of penalties in financial contracts to highlight the interactions between technology, legal environments, purpose of the financial relationship, and contractual provisions. We show that harsh monetary and non-pecuniary penalties are not mere relics from a bygone era and, at the same time, that limited liability is far from a recent institution. We then discuss trade-offs associated with legal mandates of either unlimited or limited liability, both for the contracting parties and for the rest of Society. We identify two broad patterns. First, the toughness of liability rules and bankruptcy laws decreases as exogenous sources of uncertainty become relatively more important, and increases with the opportunity for moral hazard (related to diligence, risk taking, or deception). Second, bankruptcy laws become more lenient as the scope for labor specialization and the returns to human capital or entrepreneurship increase.Limited Liability, Bankruptcy, Debt Bondage, Debtors' Prison, History

Tennessee

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I\u27d Like To Have You Do A Little Something For Me

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Sweetheart Time

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Market Incompleteness and the Equity Premium Puzzle: Evidence from State-Level Data

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rates of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete-markets case, we use consumption data for 50 U.S. states. While the use of state-level data is conceptually inferior to the use of data on individual consumption, it may be preferable because state-level data are less susceptible to measurement errors. We find that the rate of risk aversion under the incomplete-markets setup is much lower. Furthermore, including the second and third moments of the cross-sectional distribution of consumption growth in the pricing kernel lowers the estimate of risk aversion. These findings suggest that market incompleteness ought to be seen as an important component of solutions to the equity premium puzzle. Ce papier étudie l'importance de la complétude du marché en comparant le taux d'aversion au risque estimé dans le cas de marchés complets et incomplets. Dans le cas de marchés incomplets, nous utilisons des données de consommation de 50 états américains. Bien que l'utilisation de données agrégées au niveau des états est conceptuellement moins justifiée que l'utilisation de données individuelles, ce choix est préférable du fait que les données agrégées sont moins sujettes aux erreurs de mesures. Nous trouvons que le taux d'aversion au risque sous l'hypothèse de marchés incomplets est plus petit. De plus, la prise en compte du deuxième et du troisième moment de la distribution transversale de la croissance de la consommation dans le pricing kernel réduit le taux d'aversion au risque estimé. Ces résultats suggèrent que l’incomplétude du marché devrait être regardé comme une composante importante de la solution du puzzle de la prime d’équité.heterogeneity, idiosyncratic consumption risk; incomplete markets; consumption-based asset pricing model; risk aversion; equity premium puzzle, hétérogénéité, risque inhérent à la consommation, marchés incomplets, modèle d’évaluation d’actif basé sur la consommation, aversion au risque, puzzle de la prime d’équité