Results-based financing (RBF) is one of several broad approaches to finance official development assistance (ODA) “that attempt[s] to connect at least a portion of payment to the verified achievement of results.” Despite some relatively high-profile programs and pilots—and broad interest and curiosi...

This paper illustrates the tradeoff between country ownership and funders’ priorities with a formal model in which aid is governed by a contract to produce a jointly desired outcome. The model generalizes the Principal-Agent approaches for studying aid which treat countries as having multiple ...

Using publicly available information, we describe all seven DIBs, and evaluate the three “health DIBs” in more detail, comparing their stakeholders, implementation, and outcome structures. We offer three recommendations to improve evaluation and inform development of DIBs in the future. ...

Rwanda’s performance-based incentives were effective for some indicators, but unconditional financing also induced improvements. The incentive effects persisted in the medium-run and as the program was scaled-up.

Despite the considerable interest in Development Impact Bonds, only a few have reached the implementation phase. We use information from stakeholder interviews to describe the design of one DIB in-depth and use lessons from a range of impact bonds to develop recommendations for potential partners to...