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.

A classroom experiment on exchange rate determination with purchasing power parity

Publication Date
2007-February-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

A general-equilibrium analysis of public policy for pharmaceutical prices

Publication Date
2005-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Foreign aid and domestic politics: Voting in congress and the allocation of USAID contracts across congressional districts

Publication Date
1998-June-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years...

View

How do political changes influence U.S. bilateral aid allocations? Evidence from panel data

Publication Date
2005-June-30
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper examines the role of U.S. domestic politics in the allocation of foreign aid using panel data on aid to 119 countries from 1960 to 1997. Employing proxies for four aid allocation criteria (development concerns, strategic importance, commercial importance...

View

Intergenerational strategic behavior and crowding out in a general equilibrium model

Publication Date
2005-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Reassessing the role of constituency in congressional voting

Publication Date
2000-August-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Poole and Rosenthal (1997) argue that most congressional voting can be understood in terms of a low-dimensional spatial model. This paper uses their model to assess the importance of the two mechanisms that could contribute to the vote-predicting power of...

View

Ricardian equivalence survives strategic behavior

Publication Date
2004-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

Using NAICS to identify national industry cluster templates for applied regional analysis

Publication Date
2006-December-16
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

View

World Bank independence: A model and statistical analysis of U.S. influence

Publication Date
2005-June-30
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper develops a model to test whether World Bank lending caters to U.S. interests. We use country-level panel data to examine the geographic distribution of World Bank lending to 110 countries from 1968 to 2002. After controlling for country...

View