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...

It is commonly believed that firms prefer layoffs to worksharing, in part, because layoffs economize on fringe benefit costs. We find that when labor markets are characterized by optimal implicit contracts, layoffs will never occur in equilibrium, regardless of the...

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...

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...

A behavioral model is developed to explain the magnitude of surplus and the division of surplus into unproductive and profit for oligopoly firms in the manufacturing sector of advanced capitalist economies. Particular attention is focused upon the determinants of interfirm...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the extent to which zakat - a form of religiously-mandated charity under Islam - achieves its intended objective in Pakistan. Detailed income and expenditure data from Pakistan's Household Income and Expenditure Survey for 1987-88...