Vassar Scholarship

The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has distributed our lives in every aspect. After a year of living under the 'new normal, we are finally seeing vaccinations becoming available, which greatly benefits everyone at risk. This pandemic uncovered 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...

Different political regimes have principals that possess different in- formation regarding agents' behavior. This paper studies how this difference affects the comparative efficiency of corruption control between a democratic regime and an authoritarian regime. We ob- serve that such comparative...

This thesis investigates why music streaming services are so popular, beyond their affordability, and the ways in which streaming is shifting music culture. Certain aspects of listening culture which we tend to understand as originating from streaming services, specifically the...

I present a model that can transform discounts on closed-end mutual funds into a measure of investor sentiment about the ability of fund managers to beat the market. This measure of sentiment varies positively with capital flows into actively managed...

This thesis interrogates the social function of small-town theater in the United States. Through a series of interviews with theater artists working at regional and local theaters in the northeast United States, I demonstrate theater's capacity to both reproduce and...