README TO Democracy and Aid Donorship, Budjan, Angelika J., and Andreas Fuchs, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

AEA Data and Code Repository project ID: 120068

The replication material consists of four Stata do files, 20 raw input data files, five analysis datasets, and two shapefiles contained in the “outputdata” folder. Analyses have been performed with Stata version 14.0. Running the master do file (“Democracy and Aid Donorship replication file MAIN.do”) will call the configuration do file (“config.do”), the data cleaning do file (“Prepare data.do”), and the data analysis do file (“Analyse data.do”). The configuration do file creates five new folders: the “ado” folder where necessary ado files are stored; the “outputdata” folder where the generated analysis datasets are stored; the “tables” folder where results tables are stored; the “figures” folder where generated figures are stored and the “tempdata” folder where temporary datasets are stored and which are automatically deleted by the end of the script.

In order to run the master do file (“Democracy and Aid Donorship replication file MAIN.do”), insert the correct folder path in line 19.

The data analyses do file (“Analyse data.do”) generates four regression datasets in the “outputdata” folder. We had to omit some raw databases from the “input” data folder due to copyright reasons (Marshall et al. 2016; Banks and Wilson 2016; FreedomHouse 2016; Bormann et al. 2017; Correlates of War Project 2017). Since several “input” datasets are omitted from the download package, the do file will neither run without error nor produce the complete datasets required for the analysis – which we however provide in their entirety in the “outputdata” folder. The four regression datasets are the following: ·

• “new_donors_MAIN.dta” is needed to create Tables 1-3, Figures 2-4, and most tables and figures of the Online Appendix ·
  
• “new_donors_limited.dta” and “new_donors_3yaverages.dta” are needed to create the robustness test of Table B3 in the Online Appendix ·
  
• “new_donors_sample_firstaid.dta” is needed to create robustness tests of Table C2 in the Online Appendix.

Figure 1 and Appendix Figure C1 were not produced with STATA. Data from our New Aid Donors Database was merged with country boundaries and saved in shapefile format in the output folder using R. This step can be replicated with the file “Prepare_figure1_figureC1.R.” To run the code, insert the correct folder path in line 9. To create the maps, open the resulting files in QGIS and format the layer “donoryear” as in the manuscript.

Lines 510-544 of “Prepare_data.do” produce our main variable of interest “democracy” as a temporary datafile (“tempdata\acemoglu_democ.dta”), using the inputs Polity IV Project version 4 (Marshall et al. 2016), Bjørnskov-Rode regime data (Bjørnskov and Rode 2020), and Freedom in the World Country and Territory Ratings and Statuses (Freedom House 2016). This file is then merged to the final analysis datasets. Since our analysis was performed prior to the publication of Acemoglu et al. (2019) and since we require a longer time period for our analysis, the employed data is our own replication and extension of Acemoglu et al.’s democracy variable. To allow users to generate Figure A3 without having executed “Prepare_data.do” before, we also included “acemoglu_democ.dta” in the outdata folder.