Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community. It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.
To achieve humanitarian objectives, international development assistance must be structured to insure its effectiveness. The resulting conditionality, however, raises sovereignty concerns as attempts to promote effectiveness may conflict with respect for recipient state sovereignty and indirectly violate individuals' right to...
We develop a model of bargaining and litigation in the context of patent licensing (or any contractual setting). Following Priest and Klein (1984) we developed a model that explicitly allows for (1) multiple parties (leading to asymmetry of stakes), (2)...
In this note we investigate the infringement (entry) decision for a firm facing an incumbent patent holder with uncertain patent rights. The entrant risks a dispute by entering, resulting in either a settlement (licensing) or litigation and trial. Using the...
This paper explores the influence of Japan and the United States over the geographic distribution of Asian Development Bank (ADB) funds. Although nominally an independent, multilateral organization, the ADB is widely regarded as bowing to the interests of its two...
This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years...
This paper examines the role of U.S. domestic politics in the allocation of foreign aid using panel data on aid to 119 countries from 1960 to 1997. Employing proxies for four aid allocation criteria (development concerns, strategic importance, commercial importance...
In June 2005, the Supreme Court made one of its least popular decisions in recent history. In Kelo v. New London, the Court missed a simple point: that local decision makers make local decisions.
This paper presents structural estimates of the probability of validity, and the probability of Type I and Type II errors by courts in patent litigation. Patents are modeled as uncertain property rights, and implications of the model are tested using...
This paper merges patent citation data with data on pharmaceutical patent expirations, generic entry, and pricing to explore the effects of observable patent characteristics on off-patent and on-patnet pharmaceutical pricing. Using a sample of drug patents facing generic entry in...
Poole and Rosenthal (1997) argue that most congressional voting can be understood in terms of a low-dimensional spatial model. This paper uses their model to assess the importance of the two mechanisms that could contribute to the vote-predicting power of...
Growing links between international governmental organizations and NGO/GROs in developing countries pose a moral dilemma as the promotion of effective development may conflict with respect for state sovereignty. This paper examines this dilemma and develops principles to balance the two...
The decision whether or not to work for a temporary agency was examined using a 1990 cross-section survey of Illinois registered nurses and a model which corrects for the simultaneity between agency choice and wages (and benefits). Conditional on having...
The use of patent citations as a measure of patent "quality" increased dramatically in recent years. I estimate the hazard of patent citation, and find evidence of unobserved heterogeneity. Hazard estimation provides a means to separate patent quality from citation...
Do temporary nursing agencies cause labor supply to nursing to be greater or less than it otherwise would be? Using cross-section survey data from 1984, 1988, and 1992, this question is examined within a nine-equation system capable of estimating hours...
In this paper I present a real options model of patent litigation when patents are not perfectly enforceable. I consider both finite horizon and infinite horizon models. The theoretical results demonstrate that patent value depends not only on the underlying...
Traditional aid conditionality has been attacked as ineffective in part because aid agencies - notably the World Bank - often fail to enforce conditions. This pattern undermines the credibility of conditionality, weakening incentives to implement policy reforms. The standard critique...
A model incorporating a discrete full-time/part-time/do not work labor choice and decomposing labor supply into its full-time and part-time components was used to examine the increase in labor supplied by nurses (the increase per nurse on average) over the 1977-88...
The Archives & Special Collections Library is part of the Vassar College Libraries system. It holds the rare book, manuscript, and archival collections of the college. It collects, preserves, and makes available rare and unique collections, and also engages in teaching and outreach activities. This collection of finding aids describe items in both the Virginia B. Smith Memorial Manuscript Collection and the College Archives.
The Vassar College herbarium holds over 8,000 specimens of vascular plants, bryophytes, and algae. Holdings are primarily from northeastern North America, and include collections made by several notable 19th century botanists. To learn more about this project visit the website here.
Vassar College's institutional repository reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community. It provides access to senior theses, peer reviewed open access articles, and projects from a wide range of disciplines.