Foreign Aid and the Intensity of Violent Armed Conflict

Does foreign aid increase or decrease violence during ongoing wars? Although answers to this question are almost surely found at local levels, most research on this topic is performed at much higher levels of analysis, most notably the country level. We investigate the impact of foreign aid on the intensity of violence during ongoing armed conflict at a microlevel. We examine the influence that concentrated aid funding has on political violence within war zones that are contested among combatants. Using new geographically coded data within a matching design, we find that multiple measures of funding concentration are associated with increased military fatalities, but not with civilian fatalities.