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.

Convergence among the U.S. states: Absolute, conditional, or club?

Publication Date
2003-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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Limited arbitrage, segmentation, and investor heterogeneity: Why the law of one price so often fails

Publication Date
2003-August-28
Document Type
Authors
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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Limited arbitrage, segmentation, and investor heterogeneity: Why the law of one price so often fails

Publication Date
2003-August-28
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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Private school choice and the returns to private schooling

Publication Date
1996-June-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper analyzes the magnitude of earnings differentials and differences in the rates of return to education for individuals who attended private and public high schools in the U.S. from 1976 to 1983, controlling for self-selection into school sector, as...

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Social capability and economic development

Publication Date
1996-November-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that postwar economic growth has been unpredictable. In the 1960s few observers accurately forecast which countries would grow quickly. In this paper we show that indexes of social development constructed in the early 1960s have considerable...

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The determinants of private high school attendance

Publication Date
1996-May-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper develops a model of private school choice that incorporates measures of the availability and costs of private schooling, as well as the quality of existing public schools, in the local market for secondary education. Using data from the...

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The determinants of private school attendance

Publication Date
1996-May-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper develops a model of private school choice that incorporates measures of the availability and costs of private schooling, as well as the quality of existing public schools, in the local market for secondary education. Using data from the...

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The option value of patent litigation: Theory and evidence

Publication Date
2003-December-01
Document Type
Authors
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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The portfolio allocation effects of investor sentiment about the ability of managers to beat the market

Publication Date
2003-February-03
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

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...

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