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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Whereas FESER and BERGMAN, 2000, developed the concept of national-level cluster templates and introduced a systematic methodology to identify such clusters, their technique and results were based on the now-outdated Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system for categorizing industries. We update...

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...