Many public organizations employ technologies of scrutiny such as peer review or quality assurance to improve their performance and decision-making. Such technologies may affect performance and decision-making directly, through scrutiny, and indirectly, through behavioural responses by agents within...

In the context of an ongoing debate around the role of aid in middle income countries, it is worth revisiting the discussion around aid allocation in general.

A growing literature measures the impact of education interventions in low- and middle-income countries on both access and learning outcomes. But how should one contextualize the size of impacts? This article provides the distribution of standardized effect sizes on learning and access from 234 stud...

This paper revisits the concept of international development aid effectiveness and its measurement as part of a review of the Quality of ODA (QuODA) assessment published regularly since 2010.

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 ...

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.

We assessed the methodological quality of global health program evaluations from five major funders between 2009 and 2014. We found that most evaluations did not meet social science methodological standards in terms of relevance, validity, and reliability. Nevertheless, good quality evaluations made...