Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

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.

Child brides in India

Publication Date
2011-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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Did the colonial powers pick the economic winners?

Publication Date
2007-September-01
Document Type
Authors
Department or Program
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Abstract

This paper proposes a new instrument for institutional quality—the salary of colonial governors—to investigate whether variations in the quality of British colonial rule continue to have an impact on the economic performance of former colonies. Governors' salaries provide a good...

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Infotainment: the pressure of ratings and their dangers for democracy in cable news

Publication Date
2016-January-01
Document Type
Authors
Department or Program
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Access Level
Abstract

In this thesis I argue that through the necessity to generate a profit, cable news organizations focus on attracting the most viewers so that they can then charge more for advertising and in turn make more money. This symbiotic relationship...

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Testing biological hypotheses with embodied robots: adaptations, accidents, and by-products in the evolution of vertebrates

Publication Date
2014-November-12
Document Type
Document Type
Abstract

Evolutionary robotics allows biologists to test hypotheses about extinct animals. In our case, we modeled some of the first vertebrates, jawless fishes, in order to study the evolution of the trait after which vertebrates are named: vertebrae. …

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