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...

This thesis explores the success of Beyoncé's self-titled album in relation to the idea of originality within music. As members of the public, we assume that what sets superstars apart from novice musicians is an element of originality. However, more...

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...

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 3.11 events in 2011 are historically the most destructive series of natural disasters to have ever hit the island nation of Japan. But while the international media has commended the bravery of survivors and applauded Japanese efforts to provide...

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and introduced a systematic methodology to identify such clusters, their technique and results were based on the now-outdated Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system for categorizing industries.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...