Vassar Scholarship

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...

In her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, and her last, Persuasion, Jane Austen centers the perspectives of gentry women, Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot, who were socially successful because of their ability to regulate their own emotions and influence those...

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...

The diminishing of temporal and spatial boundaries in the contemporary age of connectivity has fully realized Beck, Giddens and Nash's "reflexive" modernity. This reflexive modernity refers to the diminishing control of traditional institutions on individual lives. In the shift towards...

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...