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.
Looking through the 17th and 18th centuries and specifically the diaries of Samuel Pepys and William Byrd, I aim to explore the medium specificity in the diary as well as its particular moment in manuscript culture. Being written by hand...
This paper examines the distribution of income in Pakistan, and in each of its four provinces, from an explicit and formal Islamic perspective. A cardinally significant Atkinson-Kolm-Sen relative index of inequality reflecting that perspective is proposed and computed from the...
It is commonly believed that firms prefer layoffs to worksharing, in part, because layoffs economize on fringe benefit costs. We find that when labor markets are characterized by optimal implicit contracts, layoffs will never occur in equilibrium, regardless of the...
This paper presents new results on income distribution in Pakistan from an analysis of the full HIES data tapes for 1984-85, 1985-86, 1986-87, and 1987-88. An explicit social welfare methodology is adopted to measure changes in inequality at the national...
The extent to which the reform movements of revolutionary China and France "emancipated" women is difficult to assess. In many ways, French and Chinese women both benefited greatly from the sociopolitical changes wrought by the reformist ideologies of these periods...
Constant returns to scale, always a simplifying assumption, is often also much more: many important results depend critically on the very special properties of this class of production function. This paper provides a unified set of simple proofs for most...
Implicit contract models of labor market equilibrium under work sharing and layoffs are constructed to examine several common explanations for the observed market bias in favor of layoffs. We first establish the optimality of work sharing in the absence of...
This paper presents empirical evidence on the extent to which zakat - a form of religiously-mandated charity under Islam - achieves its intended objective in Pakistan. Detailed income and expenditure data from Pakistan's Household Income and Expenditure Survey for 1987-88...
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.