Business Commons^™

Planting Seeds For An Improved Agrifood System? Linking The Aims Of The Alternative Agrifood Movement To Executive Action In The First Two Years Of The Obama Administration, K. Glowa, Sarah Carvill, Costanza Rampini

Faculty Publications, Environmental Studies

This paper uses several case studies to look at the dialogic relationship between the Obama administration and the alternative agrifood movement. We evaluate the case studies based on criteria developed from the agroecology literature and literature on food security, agrarianism, and the alternative agrifood movement as a whole. Additionally we compare the policy tools utilized and the funding levels of each of the cases. Our findings suggest that the Obama administration is committed to tackling issues of food security and promoting the well-being of small- and mid-scale farmers and their local agrifood economies. Deconsolidation of large agribusiness, equitable trade, and …

The Federal Imd Exemption And Cost-Shifting, Todd Rainey

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Federal IMD exclusion has resulted in states opting to shift costs to the government by enacting inefficient Medicaid programs in order to gain federal reimbursement. The claim of “cost-shifting” relies on the assumption that state programs are inefficient – that is, that their Medicaid programs are less effective at reducing incarceration rates (as a metric for failure to properly treat) than their psychiatric hospitals. Literature in the Public Health, Psychiatric, and Criminal Justice fields was surveyed in order to determine relevant factors to be included in the model. Model variables include factors which contribute to …

Enabling Environment For Entrepreneurship, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Talks, Speeches, & Discourse

This morning I would like to divide my remarks in three parts. First, I would like to point out four mega trends – both global and national – which are going to shape the environment for business and enterprises in the future. Second, I would like to recount the main impediments that are constraining the growth of entrepreneurship in Pakistan. Finally, I would present the key elements of an enabling environment that would be conducive for the growth of entrepreneurship.

Empirical Methods-A Review: With An Introduction To Data Mining And Machine Learning, Matt Bogard

Economics Faculty Publications

This presentation was part of a staff workshop focused on empirical methods and applied research. This includes a basic overview of regression with matrix algebra, maximum likelihood, inference, and model assumptions. Distinctions are made between paradigms related to classical statistical methods and algorithmic approaches. The presentation concludes with a brief discussion of generalization error, data partitioning, decision trees, and neural networks.

How To Excel In The Fashion Industry, Elizabeth Weaver

Senior Honors Projects

How to Excel in the Fashion Industry

Elizabeth Weaver

Faculty Sponsor: Claire Lacoste Kapstein, Textiles, Merchandising and Design

Co-sponsor:  Art Mead, Economics

The fashion industry is most often thought of as a glamorous business filled with successful designers and supermodels.  For fashion students, however, the industry they seek to enter upon graduation is drastically different.  Students entering merchandising and retailing related careers will spend a large portion of their time analyzing data and working in Microsoft Excel. 
            As a graduating senior with a dual degree in Textiles, Merchandising and Design and Economics, I wanted to create a project that could …

Industrial Diversity And Economic Performance: A Spatial Analysis, Hoa Phu Duy Tran

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the linkage between industrial diversity and economic growth in the 48 contiguous states of the United States.  The period of analysis is 1992 through 2009.  Five diversity indices are considered and economic growth is measured as the growth rate of nonfarm earnings.  Other variables thought to influence economic growth are included in the analysis.  They are the growth rate of nonfarm employment, capital, and farm earnings.  Tests for the endogeneity of variables are conducted and the need for instrumental variable estimation methods is demonstrated.

First, I consider multivariate model that relates nonfarm earnings growth to the diversity …

Pay Ratios And Pay Inequality, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Some argue that reporting the ratio of CEO pay to that of the median-compensated worker in the organization is useful since it highlights the sometimes large discrepancy between the pay of an average worker and that of corporate executives. One argument against reporting the ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay is that this is much more difficult to calculate in practice than in theory. The hourly earnings of workers at the bottom have been incredibly flat for the last generation. Only the top 5% have seen large gains over time. For CEOs, the gains are substantial. the multiple …

Metropolitan Report - May 2011, Division Of Business And Economic Research, College Of Business Administration, University Of New Orleans

UNO Metropolitan Report (1986-2017)

No abstract provided.

Warning System For Property Bubbles, Jun Yu, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

A commentary on what constitutes a sound system to warn against property bubbles.

The Labor Market Effects Of U.S. Immigration: What Is The Latest Evidence?, Orn Bodvarsson

Western Migration Conference Series

Bio:

Örn Bodvarsson is Professor of Economics, Chair of the Department of Management, and Interim Chair of the Department of Social Work at St. Cloud State University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. A labor economist, Bodvarsson has been working in the immigration field since 2001, focusing on host country distributional effects of immigration, determinants of migration, internal migration in China, and wage discrimination against the foreign-born. In 2009 Springer published his co-authored book, The Economics of Immigration: Theory and Policy, recently reviewed in Journal of Economic …

Recruitment And Retention Of Immigrants In A Global Labour Market: Implications For Policy, Christopher Robinson

Western Migration Conference Series

Bio:

Chris Robinson studied economics at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, and has been a faculty member at the University of Western Ontario since 1977. His research has focused on human capital and wage issues including human capital specificity, labour supply, migration, and unions and he has published a wide range of articles on these topics in scholarly journals. From 1993 to 2003 he served as associate editor of the Journal of
Labor Economics. From 2001 to 2010 he held the CIBC Chair in Human Capital and
Productivity at the University of Western Ontario …

Economic Growth And Intellectual Property Rights, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Talks, Speeches, & Discourse

For more than two decades, the economies of different countries have grown at a pace that greatly exceeds anything previously known in the long sweep of human history. What distinguishes this period from the earlier one is what we have come to know is the knowledge economy. This reflects a very real transformation in our understanding of the factors underlying long-run economic development. In the 1950s economists discovered that there was a huge gap in their explanations of economic growth in terms of capital accumulation. Since then, other factors such as human capital, technological progress, internal organization and managerial practices …

Three Essays On Fdi In China, Mingming Pan

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has contributed a great deal to China’s extraordinary growth by injecting capital into the economy, creating jobs, transferring technology and knowledge, enhancing trade, bringing in competition for local enterprises, improving the quality of local labor and intermediate goods suppliers, and connecting China’s gradually opening economy to the global market. For over a decade, China has been the second largest recipient of inward FDI in the world behind the United States. In 2009, China received $95 billion, which is 8.5% of the world’s total. However, the large amount of inward FDI has been unevenly distributed across Chinese …

Investment Styles, Fees, & Returns Among Individually Managed & Team Managed Mutual Funds, Kendal Cehanowicz

Honors Projects in Finance

Identifying a successful mutual fund investment involves a crucial analysis of alternatives, all of which influence the true benefit of the investment. Major considerations must include performance, management and fees; which ultimately determine investment returns. Studies have shown that team managed mutual funds exhibit similar risk adjusted performance to individually managed mutual funds, however studies lack this comparison of performance based on fund fees and investment objective. This gap in research implies that there is an opportunity to examine how fund management, investment objective, and fund fees affect overall returns to the investor. Using the 2010 Center for Research in …

Oral Presentation: Students And Free Enterprise, Jami Vallesteros

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

UNLV SIFE is part of an international non-profit organization that works with leaders in business and higher education to mobilize university students to make a difference in their communities while developing the skills to become socially responsible business leaders. Participating students form teams on their university campuses and apply business concepts to develop outreach projects that improve the quality of life and standard of living for people in need. In addition to the community aspect of the program, SIFE’s leadership and career initiatives create meaningful opportunities for learning and exchange among the participants as well as the placement of students …

Monopsony And Salary Suppression: The Case Of Major League Soccer In The United States, John Twomey, James Monks

Economics Faculty Publications

Top tier professional soccer in the United States is operated by Major League Soccer (MLS). The MLS was established and operates under a single entity structure, such that all players negotiate and sign contracts with the league rather than with individual teams. This monopsonistic structure was designed to eliminate competition for players across teams within the league and thus allow the league to suppress player salaries. This paper investigates how effective the MLS has been in achieving this goal and finds that the MLS devotes only about 25 percent of its revenues to player salaries, compared to 50 to 60 …

Innovation And Employment, Hian Teck Hoon, Edmund S. Phelps

Research Collection School of Economics

Is employment higher in an economy that has a higher rate of innovation? In Hoon and Phelps (1997), we study this question in the small open, and closed, economy under the assumption that the rate of technological progress is exogenous to the economic system.In this paper, we reexamine this question in the context of a model with endogenous product innovation (and thus endogenous technological progress) and endogenous labor supply first in a small open economy taking the world interest rate as given and then ina closed economy that determines the whole term structure of the interest rate. In our present …

Do Foreign Direct Investment And Trade Openness Accelerate Economic Growth?, Donna Chan Wah Hak

Honors Projects in Economics

This research investigates the impact of trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Using a framework proposed by Barro (1991), panel data regression analysis is performed on 5-year time periods between 1985 and 2005. A sample of 89 countries is analyzed using data collected from the World Development Indicators (WDI), Penn World Table, Barro and Lee (2010), and Polity IV Project datasets. The empirical analysis shows that conditional convergence occurs among the countries in the sample and that FDI net inflows per worker slightly increases the speed of conditional convergence. This study also finds evidence that FDI …

Mexico Consensus Economic Forecast, Volume 14, Number 2, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Carlos Morales, Francisco Pallares

Departmental Papers (E & F)

No abstract provided.

Pay Secrecy And Relative Pay, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In March 2008, the Sacramento Bee began publishing the salaries of all California state workers, including public universities. UC Berkeley professors took this information and used it to learn about pay secrecy, relative income, and how people feel and react to knowing what their co-workers earn. It turns out that there is a dramatic difference in the response to new information about wages of co-workers, depending on whether an individual has wage and salary pay above or below the median for his or her workgroup. For those who earn below the middle of their group, the new information about the …

Dice Or No Dice: The Casino Debate In Massachusetts, College Of Management, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Financial Services Forum Publications

The debate on casinos has intensified over the last few years. Governor Deval Patrick tried to get approval for three casinos back in September 2008, which was rejected by the then Speaker Salvatore Dimasi. However, two years ago, the Governor stood in the way of casinos by vetoing the bill passed by the House and the Senate.

With the economy still recovering from the aftermath of the “Great Recession”, there are talks about job creation and consumer spending all over Massachusetts. Currently, the three most critical players in the government of Massachusetts - Governor Deval Patrick, House Speaker Robert DeLeo, …

The Politics Of Subsidizing Sports: Legislative Voting For Three Minnesota Sports Venues, Dave Hitchcock

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Since 1998 the State of Minnesota has funded the building of the Xcel Energy Center, Target Field, and TCF Bank Stadium. The focus of this research is to locate voting trends within the Minnesota House of Representatives towards these venues. I recorded the votes of each member on the legislation approving these venues from the Minnesota Journal of the House and then constructed data sets for all three buildings. From this data, trends emerge potentially linking the voting tendencies of members based on party, gender, and geographical location of their district. Initial analysis supports a fairly strong relationship between district …

Sectoral Changes And The Increase In Women's Labor Force Participation, Rahşan Akbulut

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, women in the United States decided to move increasingly into the labor market. This paper investigates the growth of the service sector as an explanation for the increase in women's employment. It develops an economic model that can account for the increase in women's employment and the growth of the service sector at the same time. A growth model with two sectors and a home production technology is constructed in order to quantitatively assess the contribution of sectoral productivity differences to the change in women's employment decision. The sectoral productivities are taken …

Where Locals Play: Neighborhood Casino Landscapes In Las Vegas, Rex J. Rowley Ph.D.

Occasional Papers

Neighborhood casinos—gaming properties that target a primarily local market—are an influential feature on the Las Vegas cultural landscape. Such institutions reveal a number of geographical patterns that have important implications in gaming and place studies. The distinguishing characteristics of neighborhood casinos underscore the importance of proximity to a market, a focus that is evident in their advertising strategies. Additionally, the prominence of such casino-resorts within their respective neighborhoods makes them important symbols and indicators of the character of the surrounding community. These unique institutions teach lessons that can potentially be extrapolated to other gaming markets around the country.

Target Industry Study: An Empirical Analysis Of Intertemporal Trends In Regional Industrial Base Composition, David M. Smith

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

This paper follows existing literature on local industrial conditions and agglomeration economies in an adapted shift-share framework. The purpose of this study is to develop a cost-efficient empirical model that meets the needs of local government in analyzing changes in industrial composition. The data for this model is obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) with nondisclosed data provided by the Virginia Employment Commission which is sorted by North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) 2-digit industrial sectors. The model developed in this paper identifies certain industrial sectors which exert significant influence on the …

Rich Have Responsibility To Give Back, Aaron W. Hughey

Counseling & Student Affairs Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The State Of The Fair Trade Movement, Jeff Goldman, Executive Director

Fair Trade Universities' National Convergence

No abstract provided.

Impact Of The Economic Downturn On Local Governments In South Carolina, William Tomes

Georgia Journal of Public Policy

Across the country local government revenues have decreased while operating costs such as fuel, materials, equipment, and health insurance costs have significantly increased. In addition to reduced revenues, interest earnings for city and county government investments are low. These factors combined have created a difficult financial arena in which local governments must operate. While economists are reporting signs of economic recovery, many city and county budgets are just now feeling the full brunt of the economic downturn that began in 2008. On a daily basis, news media nationwide report local governments addressing budget deficits by cutting services, eliminating positions, or …

Boeing And Airbus: Duopoly In Jeopardy?, John Olienyk, Robert J. Carbaugh

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Business

For decades, Boeing and Airbus have struggled for dominance in the large commercial aircraft market. In 2010 and 2011, the World Trade Organization ruled that each firm has received illegal subsidies from the governments of the United States and the European Union, which have enhanced their competitive positions. This paper considers the nature of these rulings and the future competitive environment in the global jetliner industry.

Motivating With Efficiency Wages And Delayed Payments, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In the delayed payment system, companies motivate workers to work hard year after year by paying them less than the value they create for the company early in the workers' tenure and more than the value they create for the company later in the workers' tenure. With efficiency wages, workers are essentially paid a wage that is higher than the next-best offer they could get. A paper by Alan Krueger found that at company-owned fast food restaurants, employee compensation is higher and the delayed payment profile is steeper than at franchised outlets. In a recent paper, Matthew Freedman and Renata …