Vassar Scholarship

Using a continuous state space approach, this note extends Feyrer's [2003] study of the proximate determinants of the shape of the long-run distribution of income per capita. Contrary to Feyrer's finding of the primacy of TFP, the results here imply...

In this paper I apply the nonparametric methods proposed by Quah to data on US state relative income levels. In contrast to Quah's results using cross-country data I find no evidence of polarization in the cross-state income distribution. The long-run...

This paper presents an easily implemented test of the assumption of a normally distributed error term for the ordered probit model. As this assumption is the central maintained hypothesis in all estimation and testing based on this model, the test...

This paper attempts to ascertain which of the convergence hypotheses – absolute, conditional, or club – best describes the economic development of the U.S. states since 1950. We use regression tree analysis to identify convergence clubs among the states and...

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 provides a survey and synthesis of econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth. While these tools range across a variety of statistical methods, they are united in the common goals of first, identifying interesting contemporaneous...

The traditional classroom presentation of international macroeconomic issues obscures the link between budget deficits, exchange rates, and the trade deficit. The article offers a simple supply and demand framework to clarify the role of budget deficits in creating trade deficits...

Many researchers have used a cointegration approach to test for the Fisher effect. This note argues that the cointegration of the nominal interest rate and the inflation rate is consistent with any theory implying a stationary real interest rate and...

In this paper we argue that modeling the cross-country distribution of per capita income as a mixture distribution provides a natural framework for the detection of convergence clubs. The framework yields tests for the number of component distributions that are...

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...

The conventional wisdom is that postwar economic growth has been unpredictable. In the 1960s few observers accurately forecast which countries would grow quickly. In this paper we show that indexes of social development constructed in the early 1960s have considerable...