Fueling Conflict? (De)Escalation and Bilateral Aid
研究双边外援对冲突升级和降级的影响，发现接受援助会增加小冲突升级为武装冲突的概率，但不会在真正和平的国家引发冲突。
Summary This paper studies the effects of bilateral foreign aid on conflict escalation and deescalation. First, we develop a new ordinal measure capturing the two‐sided and multifaceted nature of conflict. Second, we propose a dynamic ordered probit estimator that allows for unobserved heterogeneity and corrects for endogeneity. Third, we identify the causal effect of foreign aid on conflict by predicting bilateral aid flows based on electoral outcomes of donor countries which are exogenous to recipients. Receiving bilateral aid raises the chances of escalating from small conflict to armed conflict, but we find little evidence that aid ignites conflict in truly peaceful countries.