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.
Arbitrage pressures that could equalize closed-end fund share prices with fund portfolio values appear to be largely absent in an extensive data set. Observed fund behavior violates the static arbitrage bounds of Gemmill and Thomas (2002) and is inconsistent with...
In the past, poignant controlling images and stereotypes have run prevalent in the American historical framework. However, these tropes are routinely challenged by black feminists and black entertainers in contemporary popular culture. This thesis will garner a comprehensive analysis of...
Previous papers find no relationship between interest rates and the discounts of US closed-end funds before 1985. This is taken as evidence against management fees being a cause of discounts because a negative relationship is expected: if interest rates rise...
My thesis is an exploration of the evolving relationship between the US State and the news media in periods of conflict, ranging from World War I to the War in Iraq, and how this relationship culminated in the practice of...
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...
There are numerous examples of assets with identical payout streams being priced differently. These violations of the law of one price result from two factors. First, investors have heterogeneous asset valuations so that if two groups of investors trade in...
As the Internet drifts away from being a novel technology, people have increasingly become fascinated by the sometimes-garish, comparatively rudimentary aesthetics of the early web. Using Walter Benjamin's reflections on the Parisian arcades as a framework, I propose that this...
Arbitrage positions that benefit from the reversion of closed-end fund discounts to rational levels show excess returns that increase in magnitude the more funds are mispriced. At the same time, fund trading volumes and bid-ask spreads more than double as...
The behavior of US closed-end funds is very different from that of the UK funds studied by Gemmill and Thomas (2002). There is no evidence that their discounts are constrained by arbitrage barriers, no evidence that higher expenses increase discounts...
The reaction of closed-end fund share prices to changes in portfolio values is on average the same whether funds are trading at discounts or premia and whether the changes in portfolio values are positive or negative. If closed-end fund discounts...
The larger a closed-end fund's premium over its portfolio value, the more intensely it is sold short. However, the intensity of short selling affects neither the rate at which premia mean revert to fundamental values nor the rate of return...
This paper argues that the degree to which a given industry's labor contracts are complete or incomplete is the major factor determining whether its workforce will be unionized. For instance, assembly line industries feature complete labor contracts because of the...
The Archives & Special Collections Library is part of the Vassar College Libraries system. It holds the rare book, manuscript, and archival collections of the college. It collects, preserves, and makes available rare and unique collections, and also engages in teaching and outreach activities. This collection of finding aids describe items in both the Virginia B. Smith Memorial Manuscript Collection and the College Archives.
The Vassar College herbarium holds over 8,000 specimens of vascular plants, bryophytes, and algae. Holdings are primarily from northeastern North America, and include collections made by several notable 19th century botanists. To learn more about this project visit the website here.
Vassar College's institutional repository reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community. It provides access to senior theses, peer reviewed open access articles, and projects from a wide range of disciplines.