Essays on foreign aid and governance

This thesis aims to empirically investigate the effects of foreign aid on different aspects of governance in recipient countries, namely elections, corruption, and democracy. The first chapter focuses on electoral outcomes in Uganda, the second chapter focuses on World Bank aid and corruption in firms, and the last chapter focuses on aid and country-level democratic outcomes globally. The results shown that aid has different impacts on different aspects of goverance. I find evidence of aid used as a vote-buying mechanism to benefit the incumbent in Uganda, but multilateral aid seems to reduce corruption at the firm-level, and aid also seems to foster democracy albeit with a very small effect.