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.

Aid and sovereignty

Publication Date
1998-August-24
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

To achieve humanitarian objectives, international development assistance must be structured to insure its effectiveness. The resulting conditionality, however, raises sovereignty concerns as attempts to promote effectiveness may conflict with respect for recipient state sovereignty and indirectly violate individuals' right to...

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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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Foreign aid and domestic politics: Voting in congress and the allocation of USAID contracts across congressional districts

Publication Date
1998-June-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years...

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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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Price collusion in an infinitely repeated Hotelling duopoly

Publication Date
1998-August-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper explores the effect product differentiation has on the ability of firms to collude in setting prices. It is often thought that product differentiation can be an impediment to collusion. However, the results in this paper suggest that product...

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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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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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Role of bank branch locations in minority lending

Publication Date
1998-March-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Past studies on discrimination in home mortgage lending have focused on the loan approval process, yet results show that most of the variation in minority lending across banks is due to the variation in the volume of minority applications and...

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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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Sovereignty and NGOs

Publication Date
1998-May-12
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Growing links between international governmental organizations and NGO/GROs in developing countries pose a moral dilemma as the promotion of effective development may conflict with respect for state sovereignty. This paper examines this dilemma and develops principles to balance the two...

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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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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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