Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

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.

Do fringe benefits cause layoffs?

Publication Date
1990-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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Historical and Contemporary Modes of Racism in Baltimore, Maryland

Publication Date
2013-January-01
Document Type
Document Type
Abstract

Baltimore is divided into spaces of luxury and wealth and spaces of poverty
and destitution. How did Baltimore come to be materially and spatially segregated by race, and how have those boundaries remained in a post‐Civil Rights era of purported...

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How budget deficits cause trade deficits: The simple analytics

Publication Date
1989-November-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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Optimal implicit contracts and the choice between layoffs and work sharing

Publication Date
1989-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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