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.

An Islamic perspective on inequality in Pakistan

Publication Date
1991-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper examines the distribution of income in Pakistan, and in each of its four provinces, from an explicit and formal Islamic perspective. A cardinally significant Atkinson-Kolm-Sen relative index of inequality reflecting that perspective is proposed and computed from the...

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Distribution, inflation, and public industrial enterprises

Publication Date
1991-September-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

A Kaleckian model, featuring the complementarity of the public and private sectors and administered pricing of public-sector products, is developed to examine the impact of public enterprises on income distribution between the state, capital, and labor. Public-sector mark-up and relative...

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Inequality in Pakistan, 1984-85 to 1987-88: A social welfare approach

Publication Date
1991-August-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper presents new results on income distribution in Pakistan from an analysis of the full HIES data tapes for 1984-85, 1985-86, 1986-87, and 1987-88. An explicit social welfare methodology is adopted to measure changes in inequality at the national...

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On the geometry of constant returns

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

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...

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Quesnay's Tableau Economique: An expository note

Publication Date
1991-September-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Francois Quesney's Tableau is reformulated as a two-sector linear system. Stationary state interclass exchanges are described by a sequential accounting Tableau of real and monetary holdings of each class at each step of the circulation process. A diagrammatic framework is...

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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...

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Share-price reaction to supervisory goodwill litigation: The Cal Fed case

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

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...

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Wealth effects of supervisory goodwill litigation: A portfolio approach

Publication Date
2000-March-18
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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Work without wages: The motivation for volunteer labor

Publication Date
1991-December-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This is a theoretical and empirical exploration into the motivation of volunteer firefighters. After a brief discussion of methodology, the activities in which these volunteers engage are described and a theoretical model of volunteer motivation is presented. The central hypothesis...

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World Bank-borrower relations and project supervision

Publication Date
2000-September-14
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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