Aid Effectiveness: A comparison of Tied and Untied Aid

We evaluate the differential effects of Tied and Untied aid on growth, and how these effects vary with the policy environment of the recipient country. To do so, we use Burnside and Dollar (2000) and Easterly, Levine and Roodman (2003) datasets. We find that aid effectiveness is not significantly different for the two types of aid. However, when we condition on policies, we find that untied aid has a greater impact on growth than tied aid. We find that this difference is significant for the sample of low and middle-income countries, and is not statistically significant, but consistent in sign for the sub sample of low-income countries.Foreign Aid, Aid Contracts, Tied and Untied Aid

Financing Multi-stage projects under moral hazard and limited commitment

We present the optimal contract for financing a project that has N stages to be completed sequentially when the principal can not commit to abandone the project before it is completed and the project to be completed is valued by the agent. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, we find that the optimal contract provides decreasing transfers for successive unsuccessful attempts in a given stage, and smaller transfers when the subsequent stages are reached. We find that the optimal sequence of transfers is greater the bigger is the exogenous probability of returning to a preceding stage and the greater the principal’s cost of stage verification is. When intermediate stages are valued by the agent, we find that smaller transfers are optimal.Dynamic contracts, Moral Hazard, Foreign Aid, multi-stage projects

Optimal Incentives in Dynamic Multiple Project Contracts

We design a multiple project-funding contract that provides optimal incentives to recipients, in a setting where externalities exist among the multiple projects and where donors and recipients may differ in their valuation of the projects. To do so, we study optimal incentive payments in a dynamic principal-agent framework with focus on two-project contracts. The principal cannot observe the agent’s investment, but only completed projects. We consider principals that cannot commit to contract termination before completion of the projects; we assume that the contract does not end until both projects are accomplished. We derive the optimal contract for each possible combination of principal-agentproject characteristics to find that projects should be undertaken simultaneously when value externalities among them are large, i.e. when completing both projects gives the recipient significantly more utility than the sum of the projects’ independent values. The principal’s utility maximizing strategy, when technical externalities among projects are important, is a sequential contract that starts with the project that generates the externality. We find that differences in project valuation between agents and recipients may, in some cases, lead to inefficient contracts, when in other situations the ability of the principal to choose the timing of the project competition may be a safety clause for him.Dynamic Contracts, Multitask, Foreign Aid

La UAB porta a l'escenari "Converses sobre química" de Jane Marcet

Les dones han trobat al llarg dels temps una sèrie d'entrebancs per dedicar-se al món de la ciència. Malgrat això, moltes hi han contribuit i hi han donat suport de maneres molt diverses. En el seu treball per donar la visibilitat que es merexen a aquestes dones, el grup "Gènere, Ciència i Ensenyament de les Ciència" (GCEC) de la UAB ha portat a l'escenari l'obra "Converses sobre química", un dels molts llibres de divulgació de les ciències que escriví Jane Marcet al segle XIX.Las mujeres han encontrado a lo largo de la historia una serie de obstáculos para dedicarse al mundo de la ciencia, pero muchas han contribuido a ella y la han apoyado de maneras muy diversas. En su trabajo para dar la visibilidad que se merecen a estas mujeres, el grupo "Género, Ciencia y Enseñanza de las Ciencias" (GCEC) de la UAB ha llevado al escenario la obra "Conversaciones sobre química", uno de los muchos libros de divulgación de las ciencias que escribió Jane Marcet en el siglo XIX