Business Commons^™

Competing For Innovation: A Case Study Of Knoxville And Similar Metropolitan Areas, Lucille G. Marret

Baker Scholar Projects

Knoxville competes with other mid-sized metropolitan areas for economic development and business attraction at the national level. Cities such as Greenville, SC, Huntsville, AL, and Ann Arbor, MI have similar resources and attributes to Knoxville, yet they are consistently surpassing Knoxville in business attraction and expansion. It is necessary for policy makers to understand what factors are contributing to underperformance in order to better support Knoxville’s efforts to create an innovation fund. Comparing available assets and access to funding for each MSA reveals that Knoxville has the necessary resources through the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to …

Athletics, Academics, And The Financial Condition Of U.S. Private Colleges, Jody W. Lipford, Jerry K. Slice

Journal of Applied Sport Management

Abstract

Many private colleges in the U.S. face financial difficulty. The role of athletics in the financial condition of U.S. colleges is subject to controversy. Supporters argue that collegiate sports draw students, improve student quality, and increase donor support. Detractors argue that athletics are costly and undermine the academic mission of the institution. In this paper, we examine metrics of athletic and academic quality to determine their effects on the financial health of a sample of U.S. private colleges. Our findings indicate that higher spending on athletics reduces an institution’s financial health and that academic quality increases an institution’s financial …

Determinants Of Competitive Advantage For Sport Firms: Using Public Big Data In Korea, Iksu Jun, Hojun Sung, Juho Park, Hyun-Woo Lee

Journal of Applied Sport Management

This study examines the determinants of competitive advantage with respect to economic performance of sport firms. Logit regressions estimated dependent variables of economic performance measures based on sales per capita of firms. Determinants of competitive advantage were estimated by efficiency indicators, organization characteristic indicators, and industry classification indicators. Increase in efficiency was a significant determinant of competitive advantage as well as organizational type, size of human resource, diversification of products, and sales growth rate. Operationalizing competitive advantage as outperforming the market average and better than the top 10%, the logit regression model provides means for sport firms to analyze industry …

The Effect Of Inputs On Poultry Production Output, Ty M. Wolaver

Masters Theses

To combat poverty and malnutrition, Feed the Future Tworore Inkoko, Twunguke (TI) has set out to teach Rwandan farmers how to grow broilers as additional income for the farmers and an additional protein source within the community to combat malnutrition. Throughout this program, the inputs and outputs of the farmers were recorded, and the goal is to determine an efficiency score for each flock raised and use that information to determine what factors contributed to a higher flock efficiency. A data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to determine the efficiency score of each flock. Using these efficiency scores, a regression …

The Green Gap: How Consumers Value Sustainable Fashion, Alexandra K. Richey

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Three Essays In Public Finance, Md Sabbirul Haque

Doctoral Dissertations

The first chapter examines the long-run and short-run elasticity of income with respect to changes in tax rates. The Elasticity of Taxable Income (ETI) is a largely-debated parameter in both research and policy. Despite the growing importance of ETI, the literature has not fully considered the intertemporal impacts of taxation. I expand the literature by estimating short-run and long-run impacts of tax rate changes relying on the most recent estimation method and using appropriate lagged values of income when constructing the predicted net-of-tax rate instruments. The short-run ETI in the baseline specification is 0.69 whereas estimates for the Elasticity of …

The Decline Of American Entrepreneurship: An Analysis Of Causes Of Macro Market Trends And A Changing American Economic System, Owen Flomberg

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Oppressive Pressures Of Globalization And Neoliberalism On Mexican Maquiladora Garment Workers, Jenna Demeter

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

The international economic trends of globalization and neoliberalism have exposed and enabled the exploitation of Mexican workers, especially women in the maquiladora garment industry. During the 1950s, globalization gave rise to the new international division of labor and transnational corporations (TNCs) that have offshored labor-intensive phases of production to developing countries, many of which have pursued export-led industrialization. Export processing in Mexico was encouraged in the 1960s by Item 807 of the U.S. Tariff Code and Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program. Especially following the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, advanced capitalist countries and International Financial Institutions foisted neoliberal structural …

The Pricing Impact Of The Decreasing Competitiveness Of The Health Insurance Market, Lauren N. Patterson

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

The Affordable Care Act created the national insurance exchanges of qualified health plans to encourage a higher insured rate, larger risk pools, and lower prices for quality health coverage. Consolidation of insurers can have opposing effects. The insurers’ risk pools will grow, allowing insurers to better hedge for risk. However, consolidation decreases the prevalence of competition in the market, and past research shows that insurer consolidation decreases market competition and increases prices.

I examine how the number of plans offered in a set market, pricing components, and county health variables impact the monthly premium pricing of plans sold on the …

The Pricing Impact Of Decreasing Competitiveness Of The Health Insurance Market, Lauren N. Patterson

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Economic Forecasting With Many Predictors, Fanning Meng

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation is focused on the analysis of economic forecasting with a large number of predictors.

The first chapter develops a novel forecasting method that minimizes the effects of weak predictors and estimation errors on the accuracy of equity premium forecasts. The proposed method is based on an averaging scheme applied to quantiles conditional on predictors selected by LASSO. The resulting forecasts outperform the historical average, and other existing models, by statistically and economically meaningful margins.

In the second chapter, we find that incorporating distributional and high-frequency information into a forecasting model can produce substantial accuracy gains. Distributional information is …

Does Globalization Improve Quality Of Life?, Laura E. Hirt

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Does Political Giving Impact Shareholder Wealth? Evidence From State Campaign Finance Reforms, Douglas Brian Blank Ii

Doctoral Dissertations

Does corporate political giving actually affect shareholder wealth? While firms value political participation, some lawmakers oppose corporate involvement in politics. Yet, the existing literature has established a correlation between campaign finance and corporate outcomes without fully documenting a causal relation. I use an innovative database of political giving to exploit changes in state campaign finance laws as an exogenous shock to political giving. Specifically, I use the staggered adoption of externally imposed legal limits to political giving across U.S. states to expose how shareholder wealth responds. I find shareholder wealth declines following legally imposed reductions in political giving. The causal …

A Theoretical And Experimental Investigation Of Efficiency, Equity, And Uncertainty In Tournaments, Nicholas Busko

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays centered around labor incentives that arise in relative compensation contracts. Chapter 1 poses the question: if devotion to a core competence were truly optimal, why would firms do otherwise? We argue that the behavior of drifting from the core may be motivated by the competitive incentives faced by managers who seek to rise within a firm. We find competition creates an incentive for a manager to look for less correlated opportunities that pull the firm in a new direction. In a symmetric equilibrium all managers behave this way, leading to lower expected output for …

Theory And Experiments Exploring Behavioral, Financial, And Public Economics, Matthew John Mcmahon

Doctoral Dissertations

I study three questions which relate to one another only in that each explores facets of economics. First, I theoretically examine the conditions under which introducing an impure public good decreases total public provision. I introduce a central planner who can tax the private good to correct this and identify the market characteristics that typify this scenario. Second, I test the two standard competing dividend puzzle hypotheses using a laboratory experiment. Evidence from the lab, including variables unobservable in the field, reinforces empirical work supporting the outcome model over the substitute. Last, I obscure from dictators information regarding recipients' income …

State Space Modelling Of Dynamic Choice Behavior With Habit Persistence, Kang Bok Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present a new approach to capturing dependence across time in dynamic choice data. To achieve this, I develop a state space dynamic choice model and a novel algorithm to fit the data. Instead of capturing dependence in outcomes through lagged response variables, referred to as state dependence, I introduce a lagged utility term through the latent state equation. The lagged utility term captures habit persistence, which has not been explored directly in earlier models (Heckman, 1981b). The autoregressive nature of the lagged utility provides a significantly richer summary of prior utility than a lagged outcome variable. …

The Business Of Coupons-Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret P. Ross

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In recent years, couponing has emerged as a pop culture phenomenon. Businesses of all types are taking advantage of this resource by revamping their out-dated programs and turning them into something fresh to excite customers. Many questions remain unanswered concerning the viability, profitability, and usefulness of coupons. This study is an analysis of the effectiveness of coupons in enticing return purchases in the soft-drink category and the effectiveness of price discriminating at this grocery store chain. The dataset is comprised of household level grocery store transactions compiled by dunnhumby USA for 2,500 households over a period of two years. An …

The Future Of Bitcoin: Mapping The Global Adoption Of World’S Largest Cryptocurrency Through Benefit Analysis, James K. Darlington Iii

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Business Of Coupons-Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret Peacher Ross

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Corporate Humanitarian Partnerships, Rebecca C. Keyes

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Business Of Coupons--Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret Peacher Ross

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Abstract:

In recent years, couponing has emerged as a pop-culture phenomenon. Businesses of all types are taking advantage of this resource by revamping their out-dated programs and turning them into something fresh to excite customers. However, many questions remain unanswered concerning the viability, profitability, and usefulness of coupons. This study is an analysis of the effectiveness of coupons in enticing return purchases in the soft-drink category. The dataset is comprised of household level grocery store transactions complied by dunnhumby for 2,500 households over a period of two years. An ordinary least squares regression technique is employed to analyze the dollar …

The Trans-Pacific Partnership And Japanese Politics, Eliot Francis Watson

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Essays On Gross Receipts Taxes, Zhou Yang

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation focuses on the incentives and economic effects of gross receipts taxes (GRTs) versus corporate income taxes (CITs). Conventional wisdom holds that GRTs are very poor tax instruments; however, several states have shown renewed interest in GRTs since 2002. An interesting question to ask is why states are reconsidering GRTs in spite of all criticisms. Are GRTs really as bad as what conventional wisdom says? There is little rigorous theoretical or empirical work on GRTs. My dissertation aims to help fill this gap by providing both theoretical and empirical analysis on the comparative advantages and disadvantages of GRTs versus …

Cell Phones For Development, Devendra Dilip Potnis

Annual Research Symposium of the College of Communication and Information

No abstract provided.