Vassar Scholarship

We develop a classroom experiment on exchange rate determination appropriate for undergraduate courses in macroeconomics and international economics. Students represent citizens from different countries and need to obtain currency to purchase goods. By participating in a sealed bid auction to...

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...

Retail sales of prescription drugs totaled $154.5 billion in 2001. The National Institute for Health Care Management estimates annual sales will exceed $400 billion by the year 2010. This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional effects of two policy families...

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...

The paper investigates navigability with imperfect information. It shows that the properties of navigability with perfect recall are exactly those captured by Armstrong's axioms from database theory. If the assumption of perfect recall is omitted, then Armstrong's transitivity axiom is...

The paper introduces a notion of a budget-constrained multiagent transition system that associates two financial parameters with each transition: a pre-transition minimal budget requirement and a post-transition profit. The paper proposes a new modal language for reasoning about such a...

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between coalition strategies and distributed knowledge. Unlike the existing literature, the paper assumes that a strategy must be not only executable but also verifiable. That is, the strategy of a...

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...

Modal logic S5 is commonly viewed as an epistemic logic that captures the most basic properties of knowledge. Kripke proved a completeness theorem for the first-order modal logic S5 with respect to a possible worlds semantics. A multiagent version of...

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...

Although first proposed in the database theory as properties of functional dependencies between attributes, Armstrong's axioms capture general principles of information flow by describing properties of dependencies between sets of pieces of information. This article generalizes Armstrong's axioms to a...

The return of large government budget deficits should encourage us to resume analysis of their effects. Two topics deserving further attention are the importance of correctly modeling the form of intergenerational relationships and clarification of the extent to which 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...

This podcast explores the history and scholarship of The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight by investigating contradictory research and writing in academia, as well as how the commercial, production practices of both programs shape their content. Political parody TV...

The article investigates an influence relation between two sets of agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures propositional properties of this relation valid in all threshold models of social networks with the same structure. The...

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...

Robert Barro (1974) showed government debt has no real effects when generations are linked by altruistically motivated intergenerational transfers, a result now known widely as the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem.
An important condition for debt neutrality is believed to be the...

The fact that a coalition has a strategy does not mean that the coalition knows what the strategy is. If the coalition knows the strategy, then such a strategy is called a know-how strategy of the coalition. The paper proposes...