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...

Hip-hop is the most affluent subset of Black Culture today. The globalization and mass appeal of hip-hop has made this genre bigger than music; it's style, it's dance, it's art, and even literature. Hip-Hop music is a genre that is...

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...

Throughout the forty-year conflict over the Western Sahara, the United States has supported Morocco's occupation of the disputed territory. This overall policy has remained relatively consistent over time, yet constantly subjected to contestation. The debates over policy and various modes...

Within the last few decades, cyberpunk has burgeoned in various fields of art, literature, and cinema. "Techno-Orientalism," the depiction of the "orient" in a digitalized environment, has been a major theme in cyberpunk. In works like Neal Stephenson's <em>Snow Crash </em>...

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and introduced a systematic methodology to identify such clusters, their technique and results were based on the now-outdated Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system for categorizing industries.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