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 investigates the determinants of child marriage using a new data set from rural India. Specifically, we focus on an extreme form of child marriage--that is, the marriage of girls under the age of ten. No other study to...

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...

An empirical analysis of effects of NGO interventions on health and education of women and girls in rural Rajasthan employs an original micro data set to address criticisms of NGO effectiveness. Isolating the effects of the NGO's programs from personal...

Does the well established positive association between education and investment in health hold for education beyond college? This study examines the effect of having a postgraduate degree on investment in health, using an original data set composed of samples 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...

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...

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...

Too Much, Too Soon is a curriculum toolkit that simultaneously educates young people about the realities of sexting while providing tools to critique the structures that frame sexting as a problem in the first place. Through a speculative design exercise...