How and why do the policy areas covered in World Bank loan conditions change over time and across borrowers? We hypothesize that shifts in the Bank’s economic research and policy priorities influence Bank loan conditions, even after controlling for country characteristics and international political aspects. To test this claim we apply keyword-assisted topic models to the analysis of over 13,000 World Bank policy loan conditions and close to 35,000 World Bank research papers published between 1985 and 2014. Contrary to the criticism levelled against the Bank that changes in research and policy priorities are mostly rhetorical and have little substantive effect on Bank lending, we find that internal research and policy priority shifts explain the conditions in a Bank loan at least as well as more traditional donor or borrower-specific measures central to IPE models of Bank lending.

世界银行贷款条件所涵盖的政策领域如何以及为何随着时间和借款人而变化？我们假设世行经济研究和政策重点的变化会影响世行的贷款条件，即使在控制了国家特征和国际政治因素之后也是如此。为了验证这一说法，我们将关键字辅助主题模型应用于对 1985 年至 2014 年间发表的 13,000 多项世界银行政策贷款条件和近 35,000 篇世界银行研究论文的分析。优先事项大多是口头上的，对世行贷款几乎没有实质性影响，