Vassar Scholarship

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...

The late antique and early medieval period is typically thought of as a time of change. In slavery studies, Marxist historiography argues that the period marks the shift from the "slave" to the "feudal" mode of production, and its detractors...

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...

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...

In 2003, the British government body Transport for London (TfL) introduced the Congestion Charge Zone (CCZ) encircling Central London, a system designed to reduce road congestion within the British capital’s commercially robust yet chronically gridlocked cultural centre. The primary stipulation...

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...