Vassar Scholarship

Constant returns to scale, always a simplifying assumption, is often also much more: many important results depend critically on the very special properties of this class of production function. This paper provides a unified set of simple proofs for most...

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...

More than 100 savings and loans are currently involved in supervisory goodwill litigation against the federal government, with total claims approach fifty billion dollars. These claims arise from a provision in the 1989 Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act...

Using a unique set of publicly-traded litigation certificates, we measure the wealth effects of (largely) unanticipated damage awards in the ongoing supervisory goodwill litigation between thrifts and the federal government. Estimating abnormal returns for portfolios of litigation certificates and retained...

This paper explores the relevance of the principal-agent model for analyzing development projects using data from World Bank-funded projects. After demonstrating that World Bank loan agreements can be viewed as principal-agent contracts, the paper explores the importance of the agency...