Vassar Scholarship

This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years...

This paper examines the role of U.S. domestic politics in the allocation of foreign aid using panel data on aid to 119 countries from 1960 to 1997. Employing proxies for four aid allocation criteria (development concerns, strategic importance, commercial importance...

This paper analyzes the magnitude of earnings differentials and differences in the rates of return to education for individuals who attended private and public high schools in the U.S. from 1976 to 1983, controlling for self-selection into school sector, as...

Poole and Rosenthal (1997) argue that most congressional voting can be understood in terms of a low-dimensional spatial model. This paper uses their model to assess the importance of the two mechanisms that could contribute to the vote-predicting power of...

More than 100 savings and loans are currently involved in supervisory goodwill litigation against the federal government, with total claims approach fifty billion dollars. These claims arise from a provision in the 1989 Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act...

This paper develops a model of private school choice that incorporates measures of the availability and costs of private schooling, as well as the quality of existing public schools, in the local market for secondary education. Using data from the...

This paper develops a model of private school choice that incorporates measures of the availability and costs of private schooling, as well as the quality of existing public schools, in the local market for secondary education. Using data from the...

Using a unique set of publicly-traded litigation certificates, we measure the wealth effects of (largely) unanticipated damage awards in the ongoing supervisory goodwill litigation between thrifts and the federal government. Estimating abnormal returns for portfolios of litigation certificates and retained...

This paper develops a model to test whether World Bank lending caters to U.S. interests. We use country-level panel data to examine the geographic distribution of World Bank lending to 110 countries from 1968 to 2002. After controlling for country...