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.

Arbitrage in closed-end funds: New evidence

Publication Date
2006-August-20
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Authors
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Abstract

Arbitrage pressures that could equalize closed-end fund share prices with fund portfolio values appear to be largely absent in an extensive data set. Observed fund behavior violates the static arbitrage bounds of Gemmill and Thomas (2002) and is inconsistent with...

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Armstrong's Axioms and Navigation Strategies

Publication Date
2018-February-02
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Department or Program
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Abstract

The paper investigates navigability with imperfect information. It shows that the properties of navigability with perfect recall are exactly those captured by Armstrong's axioms from database theory. If the assumption of perfect recall is omitted, then Armstrong's transitivity axiom is...

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Bargaining in the shadow of precedent: the surprising irrelevance of asymmetric stakes

Publication Date
2006-April-12
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Department or Program
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We develop a model of bargaining and litigation in the context of patent licensing (or any contractual setting). Following Priest and Klein (1984) we developed a model that explicitly allows for (1) multiple parties (leading to asymmetry of stakes), (2)...

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Credibility and credulity: how beliefs about beliefs affect entry incentives

Publication Date
2006-November-13
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Department or Program
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Abstract

In this note we investigate the infringement (entry) decision for a firm facing an incumbent patent holder with uncertain patent rights. The entrant risks a dispute by entering, resulting in either a settlement (licensing) or litigation and trial. Using the...

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Donor influence in Multilateral Development Banks: the case of the Asian Development Bank

Publication Date
2006-January-19
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Department or Program
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This paper explores the influence of Japan and the United States over the geographic distribution of Asian Development Bank (ADB) funds. Although nominally an independent, multilateral organization, the ADB is widely regarded as bowing to the interests of its two...

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Everyone knows that someone knows: quantifiers over epistemic agents

Publication Date
2018-January-01
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Department or Program
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Abstract

Modal logic S5 is commonly viewed as an epistemic logic that captures the most basic properties of knowledge. Kripke proved a completeness theorem for the first-order modal logic S5 with respect to a possible worlds semantics. A multiagent version of...

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Homer's Odyssey: A Sampling of Editions in English 1616-2017

Publication Date
2018-January
Department or Program
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Access Level
Abstract

HOMER’S ODYSSEY A Sampling of Editions in English 1616–2017 An Exhibition. Vassar College Library, 2018. The following students of GRST 289/MEDS 289 in the Fall of 2017 served as co-curators: Sydney Amspacher, Sarah Baer, Gabriella Caballero, Daisy Catling-Allen, Jack Kenney...

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Information Flow under Budget Constraints

Publication Date
2018-February-26
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Department or Program
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Abstract

Although first proposed in the database theory as properties of functional dependencies between attributes, Armstrong's axioms capture general principles of information flow by describing properties of dependencies between sets of pieces of information. This article generalizes Armstrong's axioms to a...

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Is it really the Fisher effect?

Publication Date
2006-March-01
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Department or Program
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Many researchers have used a cointegration approach to test for the Fisher effect. This note argues that the cointegration of the nominal interest rate and the inflation rate is consistent with any theory implying a stationary real interest rate and...

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Kelo, Cuno, and the broken window

Publication Date
2006-November-26
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Department or Program
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Abstract

In June 2005, the Supreme Court made one of its least popular decisions in recent history. In Kelo v. New London, the Court missed a simple point: that local decision makers make local decisions.

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Learning by suing: structural estimates of court errors in patent litigation

Publication Date
2006-November-07
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Authors
Department or Program
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This paper presents structural estimates of the probability of validity, and the probability of Type I and Type II errors by courts in patent litigation. Patents are modeled as uncertain property rights, and implications of the model are tested using...

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Lighthouse principle for diffusion in social networks

Publication Date
2018-January-01
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Department or Program
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Abstract

The article investigates an influence relation between two sets of agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures propositional properties of this relation valid in all threshold models of social networks with the same structure. The...

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Second-Order Know-How Strategies

Publication Date
2018-July-10
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Department or Program
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Abstract

The fact that a coalition has a strategy does not mean that the coalition knows what the strategy is. If the coalition knows the strategy, then such a strategy is called a know-how strategy of the coalition. The paper proposes...

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Short selling behavior when fundamentals are known: Evidence from NYSE closed-end funds

Publication Date
2006-January-11
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Authors
Department or Program
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Abstract

The larger a closed-end fund's premium over its portfolio value, the more intensely it is sold short. However, the intensity of short selling affects neither the rate at which premia mean revert to fundamental values nor the rate of return...

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Strategic Coalitions with Perfect Recall

Publication Date
2018-February-02
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Department or Program
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Abstract

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between distributed knowledge modality and coalition know-how modality. Unlike other similar systems, the one proposed here assumes perfect recall by all agents. Perfect recall is captured in the system by...

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The dynamics of patent citations

Publication Date
2006-July-03
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Authors
Department or Program
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The use of patent citations as a measure of patent "quality" increased dramatically in recent years. I estimate the hazard of patent citation, and find evidence of unobserved heterogeneity. Hazard estimation provides a means to separate patent quality from citation...

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