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.

A continuous state space approach to "Convergence by Parts,"

Publication Date
2005-March-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

A nonparametric analysis of income convergence across the US states

Publication Date
1999-December-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

A test of normality assumption in the ordered probit model

Publication Date
1995-December-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Convergence among the U.S. states: Absolute, conditional, or club?

Publication Date
2003-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Delivered Divinities: Senatorial Power and Senatorial Peril in the Importation Narratives of Cybele, Asklepios, and Bacchus

Publication Date
2020-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This thesis attempts to analyze the Roman Senate's actions during the importation of three different gods — Cybele, Asklepios, and Bacchus — into Rome during the Middle Republic (400-133 BCE) in order to deduce how the Senate manipulated these religious...

View

Growth econometrics

Publication Date
2004-October-22
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Is it really the Fisher effect?

Publication Date
2006-March-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Mixture models and convergence clubs

Publication Date
2008-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Social capability and economic development

Publication Date
1996-November-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View