Vassar Scholarship

The paper analytically and empirically examines the issue of gender inequality in household wealth in the form of tangible assets among urban poor households Thailand. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) is there a gendered pattern of asset...

This paper attempts to ascertain which of the convergence hypotheses – absolute, conditional, or club – best describes the economic development of the U.S. states since 1950. We use regression tree analysis to identify convergence clubs among the states and...

This paper provides a survey and synthesis of econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth. While these tools range across a variety of statistical methods, they are united in the common goals of first, identifying interesting contemporaneous...

In orthodox economics, honesty or integrity is treated as either part of the constraint function or the objective function. This is at the origin of the statement, "every man has his price." However, if integrity has a price, why do...

This paper is based on the notion that the nature of current labor market informalization requires rethinking in order to guide action and formulate social policies for eliminating poverty and reducing economic inequality and job insecurity. It explores conceptually and...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper I present a real options model of patent litigation when patents are not perfectly enforceable. I consider both finite horizon and infinite horizon models. The theoretical results demonstrate that patent value depends not only on the underlying...

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...