Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Nelig Meeting - December 02, 2011, New England Library Instruction Group

New England Library Instruction Group

NELIG meeting minutes at Keene State College Instruction Swap.

Scholarly Communication, Open Access Publishing, And The Berlin Declaration, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

Presentation to the Faculty Senate Research Council to facilitate discussion of UMass Amherst as a potential signatory to the Berlin Declaration. Discussion included new scholarly communication models, author rights, peer review, work already undertaken by the university, the Faculty Senate, and other related developments throughout the country.

Scholarly Communication, Open Access Publishing, And The Berlin Declaration, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

Presentation given to the Faculty Senate Research Council prior to signing the Berlin Declaration.

Small And As Productive : Female Headed Households And The Inverse Relationship Between Land Size And Output In Kenya, Mwangi Wa Githinji, Charalampos Konstantinidis, Andrew Barenberg

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Access to land and particularly its distribution has reemerged as an important part of both academic and policy discussions in the last decade, leading to the resuscitation of the debate on the relationship between size of holdings and output per land unit. Across the world, studies have suggested the existence of a decreasing relationship between land size and output per unit of land. The most-widely accepted explanation for this relationship is that households with smaller holdings tend to be labor rich relative to land, and therefore can achieve higher output through the increased application of labor. Despite the rich literature …

Technology, Distribution And The Rate Of Profit In The Us Economy: Understanding The Current Crisis, Deepankar Basu, Ramaa Vasudevan

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper offers a synoptic account of the state of the debate within Marxist scholars regarding the current structural crisis of capitalism, identifies two broad streams within the literature dealing, in turn, with aggregate demand and profitability problems, and proceeds to concentrate on an analysis of issues surrounding the profitability problem in two steps. First, evidence on profitability trends for the Nonfarm Nonfinancial Corporate Business, the Nonfinancial Corporate Business and the Corporate Business sectors in post-War U.S. are summarized. A broad range of profit rate measures are covered and data from both the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (NIPA and …

Land, Poverty And Human Development In Kenya, Mwangi Wa Githinji

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The question of poverty has become central to the work of development economists in the last decade and a half. The 2000 World Development Report was entitled Attacking Poverty and the UN held a series of World Conferences in the 1990s, all of which addressed in some form or fashion the problem of poverty. Despite this and because of limited data there has been relatively little empirical work at the household level on determinants of poverty in Africa generally and Kenya specifically. In the few econometric studies that have been done for Kenya land has not been a significant determinant …

Libraries For Sustainability - Networking Event At Aashe 2011, Madeleine K. Charney, Bonnie J. Smith

Madeleine K. Charney

"Libraries for Sustainability" was a networking event held at the AASHE conference on 10/11/2011. Participants mostly included sustainability officers with a handful of librarians. A lively and productive discussion yielded ten ideas for connecting campus libraries as partners in the sustainability movement.

Getting Closer: The Librarian, The Curriculum And The Office Of Sustainability, Madeleine K. Charney

Madeleine K. Charney

As teachers of critical thinking and sound reasoning, academic librarians play a vital role in supporting sustainability across the curriculum. Seasoned consolidators and distributors of information, librarians also bring a unique voice to sustainability councils and committees. The forging of partnerships between the Library and the Office of Sustainability holds great potential for strengthening the surge of sustainability in higher education. This presentation centers on survey and interview responses from librarians who are instrumental in shaping sustainability on their campuses. Article here: http://works.bepress.com/charney_madeleine/69/

Consortial Collection Analysis To Reduce Unnecessary Monographic Duplication, Leslie Horner Button

Leslie Horner Button

No abstract provided.

Population 7 – Lyman Street Art Intervention, Carli Foster, Elizabeth Ann Englebreston, Eric Wojtowicz, Yiwei Huang

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

POPULATION 7 started as an experiment in the fall of 2011 as an Urban Art Laboratory “Art – Place – Tour” with the vision to make a tangible impact to the culture of public art in Springfield. At first sight art seems to be not existent in the public realm. We are searching for an organic, sustainable concept with the potential to grow from inside to outside. Our goal is to invite to a discussion about public art and art in general that is introduced through minimal but diverse, economical eventually temporary, site-responsive interventions. We see our art as personal …

Developing Meaningful Data Services At The University Of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries [Poster], Rebecca C. Reznik-Zellen, Maxine Schmidt, Jessica Adamick, Mj Canavan, Steve Mcginty

Rebecca C. Reznik-Zellen

Environmental scanning exercises enable an institution to develop a clear understanding of complex issues before making high-impact process decisions or commitments. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the path to embracing the current data management trend includes several complementary, exploratory exercises designed to help the Libraries not only understand the nuances of the local research environment but also to evaluate practices at peer institutions that may serve as a model for engaging and supporting faculty. By crafting a vision that prioritizes the needs of the campus community while learning from external solutions, the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries are able …

An Empirical Analysis Of Risk Preferences, Compensation Risk, And Employee Outcomes, Fidan A. Kurtulus, Douglas Kruse, Joseph Blasi

Fidan A Kurtulus

We use the NBER Shared Capitalism Database comprised of more than 40,000 employee surveys from 14 firms to explore whether a close match between workers’ risk preferences and the riskiness of their compensation packages relates to improved employee outcomes including lower absenteeism, lower shirking, lower probability of voluntary turnover, greater worker motivation, and higher levels of job satisfaction and loyalty. To do this, we use survey questions reflecting workers’ risk aversion parameters, coupled with a series of measures of the riskiness of workers’ compensation packages including the proportion of pay comprised of various forms of shared capitalism such as profit …

Transparency Without Accountability, Mwangi Wa Githinji, Frank Holmquist

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Kenya has been going through a period of political reform from 1991 when section 2A of the constitution that had made Kenya a de jure one party state was repealed. The reform followed a prolonged struggle by citizens both within and without the country. Their call for democracy was one that, post the fall of the Berlin wall, was embraced by western countries. Via diplomatic pressure and conditionality on aid, western donors played an important role in the repeal of section 2a, the return of multi-party elections and in the creation and reform of a number of political institutions and …

Business Cycles, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This note outlines and discusses some of the strands in the post-Keynesian literature on business cycles. Most post-Keynesians have focused on endogenously generated cycles, but the mechanism varies: some focus on the goods market, others on financial markets, the labor market, or political intervention. The merits of formal modeling of the cycles have also come in for debate.

Distributional Biases In The Analysis Of Climate Change, Peter Skott, Leila Davis

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. These representative-agent models have an intrinsic distributional bias in favor of the rich. The bias is compounded by the se of revenue-neutrality in the allocation of emission permits. The result is mitigation recommendations that are biased downwards.

Public Debt And Full Employment In A Stock-Flow Consistent Model Of A Corporate Economy, Soon Ryoo, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper examines the fiscal requirements for continuous full employment. We find that (i) changes in the financial behavior of households and firms require adjustments in tax rates and public debt, (ii) the stability of the steady-state solution for public debt depends on the .fiscal instrument and the household consumption function, (iii) in stable cases, a fall in government consumption (or a decline in another component of autonomous demand) requires an increase in the steady-state ratio of public debt to capital, and (iv) the steady-state tax rate may be positively or negatively related to the level of debt.

Imposing A Balance Of Payment Constraint On The Kaldorian Model Of Cumulative Causation, Arslan Razmi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We combine two strands of Post Keynesian growth theory by imposing a balance of payments constraint on a Kaldorian cumulative causation model. The effects of external and internal shocks, and the degree to which cumulative causation comes into play depends on the exchange rate and capital account regimes. Exports act as the only exogenous drivers of growth only under a regime of fixed exchange rates and in the absence of relative price effects. Under flexible exchange rates, by contrast, it is internal demand that serves as the only exogenous driver of of growth. Moreover, regardless of the type of shock, …

Relative Mortality Improvements As A Marker Of Socio-Economic Inequality Across The Developing World, 1990-2009, Deepankar Basu

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Using cross country regressions, this paper constructs a novel distance-to-frontier metric for tracking broad socio-onomic inequality (including access of the poor to health infrastructure) over time for individual countries. Given the unavailability of reliable and consistent direct measures of inequality for most poor countries, especially related to non-income aspects of living standards, the metric developed in this paper can be used as an alternative indirect measure that is intuitive and easy to compute. To highlight its potential use, the metric is used to rank countries in terms of improvements in socio-economic inequality for the period since 1990. Notable examples of …

Can Asia Sustain An Export-Led Growth Strategy In The Aftermath Of The Global Crisis? An Empirical Exploration, Gonzalo Hernandez, Arslan Razmi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Many developing countries have attempted to pursue the East Asian growth model in recent decades. This model is widely perceived to have been based on export-led growth. Given that developed countries are likely to grow at a slower rate and be less willing to run trade deficits in the post financial crisis world, can this growth model be sustained? Using panel data for Asian countries, this paper contributes to addressing this question by distinguishing between different kinds of export- and tradable-led growth in order to more precisely identify the nature of growth in the pre-crisis decades. We find in particular …

Heterodox Macro After The Crisis, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Macroeconomics is in crisis and this creates openings for alternative perspectives. The dominant heterodox traditions, however, have shortcomings that need to be addressed, both to improve our understanding of the real world and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the irrelevance of most mainstream macro. This paper discusses three examples of areas that need attention: (i) investment functions (where popular specifications lack behavioral and empirical support), (ii) income distribution (where key developments have received little attention) and(iii) the relation between income inequality and financial markets (where extensions of existing models may help explain financial instability)

Public Debt In An Olg Model With Imperfect Competition, Peter Skott, Soon Ryoo

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Fiscal policy is needed to avoid dynamic inefficiency and maintain full employment in a modified Diamond OLG model with imperfect competition. A distributionally neutral tax scheme can maintain full employment in the face of variations in .household confidence.. No variations in taxes will be needed if households correctly anticipate future taxes: the tax policy functions as an insurance scheme.

Positional Goods, Climate Change And The Social Returns To Investment, Leila Davis, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. This approach can generate biases in the presence of positional goods and status effects. We show that by ignoring these direct consumption externalities, integrated assessment models overestimate the social return to conventional investment and underestimate the optimal amount of investment in mitigation. Empirical evidence on the influence of relative consumption on utility suggests that the bias could be quantitatively significant. Our results from a simple survey support this conclusion.

Increasing Inequality And Financial Instability, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Rising inequality affects the composition of asset demands as well as aggregate demand. The poor have few financial assets and their portfolio is skewed towards fixed-income assets. The rich, by contrast, hold a large proportion of their wealth in stocks. Thus, an increase in inequality tends to raise the demand for stocks. This generates capital gains, and these gains can fuel a bubble, as desired portfolios shift further towards stocks.

Poster Session - Streams: Improving Student Success In Stem At Bridgewater State University, Thomas P. Kling, Jeffrey Williams, Jennifer Mendell, Stephen Waratuke, Matthew Salomone

New England Conference for Student Success

STREAMS, an NSF-STEP grant held by Bridgewater State University, implements best-practice approaches to increasing the number of STEM graduates. STREAMS interventions include a summer bridge program, a mentoring program, curricular changes promoting inquiry-based teaching, Structured Learning Assistance in gateway courses, a Residential Learning Community, and better transfer student advising and articulation. This presentation will focus on the assessment strategies that encourage curricular change and evidence of increased student success in science and math at Bridgewater.

Concurrent Session, Strategies For Success: Increasing Achievement, Persistence, Retention And Engagement, Alicia D'Oyley, Patricia Bruno, Danijela Jackson, Jessica Henry

New England Conference for Student Success

No abstract provided.

Concurrent Session, Understanding The Transitional Needs Of Transfer Students: A Mixed Methods Study, Kelly Gray, Kait Nagi

New England Conference for Student Success

"Transition to college is challenging for many students. New Student Orientations, First-Year Seminars,

Living-Learning Communities and other initiatives are designed to support students during this time but

sometimes transfer students are left out of the process. This session will review findings from a recent

mixed-methods study designed to better understand how transfer students perceived their academic

transition into a new institution. Intended audience: those with a novice to intermediate understanding of

the transfer student experience. Takeaways: ideas and resources to create programming on other

campuses."

Concurrent Session, Using Logic Models In Faculty/Staff Collaboration For First-Year Learning Outcomes, Jonathan S. Lewis

New England Conference for Student Success

"Drawing up learning outcomes that actually influence the curriculum requires a thoughtful, collaborative process. Beginning with an institutional priority to “develop core competencies … to enhance students’ pathways for success,” a student success administrator at Wheelock College worked closely with faculty throughout Spring 2011 and developed a comprehensive list of curricular and co-curricular outcomes for all first-year students. The use of a logic model was incredibly helpful in articulating to a wide range of stakeholders the specific rationale, strategies, and desired results of this project. After a brief discussion of the specific outcomes and process at Wheelock, participants in this …

Concurrent Session, Empowering Diverse Students Through Learning Communities, Lori A. Catallozzi, Lloyd Sheldon Johnson, Lee Santos Silva

New England Conference for Student Success

"Over the past decade, Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) has earned a national reputation for its

accomplishments in creating successful learning environments for its students. The College’s Learning

Communities are the cornerstone of a comprehensive student success agenda that has resulted in a

28% increase since 2003 in fall-to-fall retention, a key indicator of progress toward degree completion.

Most notable is the college-wide increase in retention for students of color, who represent nearly 60% of

BHCC’s enrollment. This session explores two Learning Communities that are providing a rich learning

experience for BHCC’s diverse population."

Featured Session - The Power Of Research-Based Stem Education, Bruce Jackson

New England Conference for Student Success

"All seventeen Goldwater Awardees of the MassBay's Biotechnology program were either former highschool

dropouts, single mothers, chronically unemployed, living at or below the poverty line or formerly

homeless. This session will demonstrate the power of research-based undergraduate curriculums and

the transforming nature of research on nontraditional scholars."

Concurrent Session, Mission Accomplished: Community College Advisors Join Forces, Diane O'Hearn, Julie Shaw-Macdougall, Linda Scott, Karen Costa, Debra Boucher

New England Conference for Student Success

"In this session, you will learn how a small group of community college advising professionals came together over coffee & pastries to create a statewide collaborative effort that is striving to deliver effective advising on all our campuses. Participants will share best practices through active group dialogue following the presentation. Find out more how to become part of a movement that celebrates the uniqueness of community colleges and generates pivotal ideas on how you can support student success within and between colleagues. You will leave this session with a renewed sense of support and resources for your student success work. …