Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ssrn As An Initial Revolution In Academic Knowledge Aggregation And Dissemination, David Bray, Sascha Vitzthum, Benn Konsynski

Sascha Vitzthum

Within this paper we consider our results of using the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) over a period of 18 months to distribute our working papers to the research community. Our experiences have been quite positive, with SSRN serving as a platform both to inform our colleagues about our research as well as inform us about related research (through email and telephoned conversations of colleagues who discovered our paper on SSRN). We then discuss potential future directions for SSRN to consider, and how SSRN might well represent an initial revolution in 21st century academic knowledge aggregation and dissemination. Our paper …

Government Clubs: Theory And Evidence From Voluntary Environmental Programs, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

All Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established numerous voluntary environmental programs over the last fifteen years, seeking to encourage businesses to make environmental progress beyond what current law requires them to achieve. EPA aims to induce beyond-compliance behavior by offering various forms of recognition and rewards, including relief from otherwise applicable environmental regulations. Despite EPA's emphasis on voluntary programs,relatively few businesses have availed themselves of these programs -- and paradoxically, the programs that offer the most significant regulatory benefits tend to have the fewest members. We explain this paradox by focusing on (a) how programs'membership screening corresponds with membership …

Towards Self-Organizing, Smart Business Networks: Let’S Create ‘Life’ From Inert Information, David Bray, Benn Konsynski

David A. Bray

We review three different theories that can inform how researchers can determine the performance of smart business networks, to include: (1) the Theory of Evolution, (2) the Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm, and (3) research insights into computers and cognition. We suggest that each of these theories demonstrate that to be generally perceived as smart, an organism needs to be self-organizing, communicative, and tool-making. Consequentially, to determine the performance of a smart business network, we suggest that researchers need to determine the degree to which it is self-organizing, communicative, and tool-making. We then relate these findings to the Internet and …

Regional And Municipal Governance Of Public Private Partnerships, Louis Gunnigan

Louis Gunnigan

This module concentrates on the issues important to those who will be setting up PPPs and who are involved in government at a regional or municipal level. The module is centred on five tasks, namely:

• How to identify PPP opportunities and to find the best private sector partners for a PPP;

• How to organize a PPP programme within a government by enhancing cooperation amongst the relevant departments and ministries, local, regional and national authorities;

• How to be an effective manager and leader in a dynamic PPP unit;

• How to engage public support for PPPs;

• How …

The Politic 2008 Fall (Special Issue), The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.

The Politic 2008 Fall, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.

Contract Management: A P.A. Education For Boundary Managers., M. Ernita Joaquin

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

Graduates of public administration programs might reasonably be expected to accurately spell out, even in their sleep, POSDCoRB. After all, it was Luther Gulick's rock-hewn formulation of the skills involved in public administration, circa 1937. Almost seven decades later, in their book Governing by Network, Stephen Goldsmith and William Eggers called for a
cultural transformation in the way we build capacity in the public sector, and, as I see it, crafting a new POSDCoRB for our time.

Evaluating The Social Effects Of Environmental Leadership Programs, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

All Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, EPA and over 20 states have created voluntary environmental leadership programs designed to recognize and reward businesses that take steps that go beyond compliance with the strictures of environmental law. Environmental leadership programs seek not only to spur direct improvements to environment quality but also to advance broader social goals that may lead indirectly to environmental improvements, such as improving business-government relationships and changing business culture. Measuring progress toward leadership programs’ social goals is a particularly challenging but essential task if researchers and decision makers are to understand the full impacts of these programs. In this …

An Economic Development Plan For Boulder City, Mel Barosay, Amber Z. Cunningham, Dollinda Fields, Silas Prince

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Boulder City is rich with natural resources such as abundant land, 50% of Hoover Dam's power generation at cheap rates, and a high priority right of Colorado River Water. In addition to low utility rates, Boulder City residents have the lowest property taxes by far compared to other cities in southern Nevada. Unfortunately due to needed infrastructure replacement and new expenses facing Boulder City, such as paying for a portion of the third intake at Lake Mead, revenue is no longer covering the city's expenses.

Through the previous group's (grad students of the Spring 2008 Semester) research, we combined both …

Emergence Of Nanodistricts In The United States: Path Dependency Or New Opportunities?, Philip Shapira, Jan Youtie

Philip Shapira

Multiple economic development theories suggest that research and innovation in emerging technologies will cluster in certain locations rather then distributing equally among all regions. If this is the case, this distributional pattern has implications for where future economic opportunities as well as future risks will be concentrated. In this paper, we probe nanotechnology (hereafter nano) research and commercialization at a regional level. The study examines the top 30 US “nanodistricts” or metropolitan areas which lead in nanotechnology research activity over the 1990-2006 timeframe. We explore the factors underlying the emergence of these 30 metropolitan areas through exploratory cluster analysis. We …

Eureka! Winning Ways: Analysis Of Early Client Experiences, Lynne Manrique, Kamau Bobb, David Roessner, Jan Youtie, Philip Shapira

Philip Shapira

The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a longstanding record of helping small- and medium-sized (SME) manufacturers to identify and implement technologies and practices that improve manufacturing efficiency and product quality. More recently, MEP has begun to build a growth services portfolio to assist manufacturers with the development of new products, new customers, and new markets. Its first growth services offering, called Eureka! Winning Ways (E!WW), was piloted in late 2006 and has been implemented widely since the beginning of 2008. To explore the nature of early E!WW client experiences, as well …

Evaluating Organizational Effectiveness, Wesley A. Martz

Dissertations

If organizations are to survive and achieve long-run viability, they must be effective. Yet organizational effectiveness evaluation has been limited by a variety of factors--especially the ambiguity surrounding the concept of organizational effectiveness itself. The long-established approaches used by organizational theorists to define organizational effectiveness have emphasized different perspectives with respect to the organization type and degrees of importance of the various constituency groups comprising the organization. Moreover, definitions of the organization and organizational effectiveness have focused primarily on the dissimilarities among organizations and their constituencies, conceding efforts to identify commonalities . This has led to increased fragmentation of the …

Policy Analysis: Compressed Workweek, Rick Crosby, Matt Richardson, Stephen Nowicki, Ly Doan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Today the economy has slowed down and inflation has risen to near record highs. Corporations, governments, and agencies are looking at ways to save costs. Budget expenditures on payroll are addressed as well as the cost of utilities, resources, and the costs of doing business. One implicated method to help solve these problems is for the use of compressed workweeks. Compressed workweeks are both beneficial to the agencies and the employees. The employee can have more time for home life while putting in the same amount of hours at work, and save money on commuting to work. Additionally the agency …

Parenting From Prison: Family Relationships Of Incarcerated Women In Massachusetts, Erika Kates, Sylvia Mignon, Paige Ransford

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

Historically in the United States, there has been little concern about the needs of incarcerated women and their family members, especially children. This began to change with the tremendous increase in the number of incarcerated women. The rate of women’s incarceration increased dramatically during the 1980s and today the number of female inmates continues to rise faster than the number of male inmates. In 1986, 19,812 women were incarcerated in the United States and this number rose in 1991 to 38,796. Today, over 112,000 women are incarcerated in state or federal facilities (Sabol et al., 2007; Snell 1994). While in …

Rethinking Broadband Internet Access, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The emergence of broadband Internet technologies, such as cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) systems, has reopened debates over how the Internet should be regulated. Advocates of network neutrality and open access to cable modem systems have proposed extending the regulatory regime developed to govern conventional telephone and narrowband Internet service to broadband. A critical analysis of the rationales traditionally invoked to justify the regulation of telecommunications networks--such as natural monopoly, network economic effects, vertical exclusion, and the dangers of ruinous competition--reveals that those rationales depend on empirical and theoretical preconditions that do not apply to broadband. In addition, …

The Antitrust Standard For Unlawful Exclusionary Conduct, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers the general definition of unlawful exclusionary practices under Section 2 of the Sherman Act as acts that: (1) are reasonably capable of creating, enlarging or prolonging monopoly power by impairing the opportunities of rivals; and (2) that either (2a) do not benefit consumers at all, or (2b) are unnecessary for the particular consumer benefits claimed for them, or (2c) produce harms disproportionate to any resulting benefits. An important purpose of this progression of queries is to permit the court to avoid balancing, although balancing certainly cannot be avoided in some close cases. The given definition is very …

Call To Action: A Pay Equity Resource Guide, Kacie Kelly

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

Women continue to enter the workforce at record levels and laws on the state and federal levels prohibit gender discrimination in the workplace. Yet employment discrimination persists and women’s wages remain lower than men’s wages for comparable positions and occupations. With the 2005 publication of GETTING EVEN: Why Women Don’t Get Paid as Much as Men and What To Do About It by Economist and former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Murphy, the issue of wage equity is finally receiving the widespread and sustained attention it deserves.

This resource guide provides an overview of the issues related to the wage gap …

Happiness Research And Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler, Eric Posner

All Faculty Scholarship

A growing body of research on happiness or subjective well-being shows, among other things, that people adapt to many injuries more rapidly than is commonly thought, fail to predict the degree of adaptation and hence overestimate the impact of those injuries on their well-being, and, similarly, enjoy small or moderate rather than significant changes in well-being in response to significant changes in income. Some researchers believe that these findings pose a challenge to cost-benefit analysis, and argue that project evaluation decision-procedures based on economic premises should be replaced with procedures that directly maximize subjective well-being. This view turns out to …

Reducing World Poverty By Improving Evaluation Of Development Aid, Paul Clements, Thomaz Chianca, Ryoh Sasaki

Paul Clements

No abstract provided.

Misinformed Consent: Non-Medical Bases For American Birth Recommendations As A Human-Rights Issue, Lisa Chalidze

MALS Final Projects, 1995-2019

A significant number of American women receive clinical birthing-option advice from obstetrician-gynecologists ("ob-gyns") that is based at least in part on non-medical considerations, without being informed of the non-medical bases that influence the recommendations they receive. The first premise of this paper is that the provision of medical advice in this manner constitutes a human-rights violation under both international and American human-rights norms. The second premise of this paper is that these violations may be averted or alleviated by greater transparency in American medical-services provision, particularly with reference to establishment of clinical practice standards by the American College of Obstetricians …

City Of Las Vegas Human Resources Promotional Selection Process Program Evaluation, Rik Holman, Cecil Johnson, April Thomas, Steve Weber

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The City of Las Vegas Human Resources Department requested the evaluation team examine the perception of fairness in the promotional selection process as demonstrated by the results of the 2007 Diversity and Inclusion Survey and related complaints from some of the employees. Based on discussions with the Human Resources department and subsequent interviews with other stakeholders, the main focus of the evaluation team covered the strengths and weaknesses of the promotional process and determining the reasons for the perceived preferential treatment in the promotional process as expressed by city employees who responded to the 2007 Diversity and Inclusion Survey. While …

Recruit Training Academy Las Vegas Fire And Rescue, Kristin Cooper, Christine Dudas, Torrell Huber, Stephanie Jordan, Darryl Martin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

After the retirement of Fire Chief Washington, the Las Vegas City Manager, Doug Selby and the Deputy City Manager, Betsy Fretwell sought input from Fire Department personnel on what qualities they would like to see in a new fire chief. Selby and Fretwell visited all fire department personnel, whether located in a fire station (called "the floor") or in administration. While Selby and Fretwell did learn about the leadership qualities the fire fighting personnel expected in a new chief, they also heard serious concerns expressed about the Recruit Training Academy (the Academy) and the quality of the rookies it was …

Refining Search Terms For Nanotechnology, Alan L. Porter, Jan Youtie, Philip Shapira, David J. Schoeneck

Philip Shapira

The ability to delineate the boundaries of an emerging technology is central to obtaining an understanding of the technology’s research paths and commercialization prospects. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the case of nanotechnology (hereafter identified as “nano”) given its current rapid growth and multidisciplinary nature. (Under the rubric of nanotechnology, we also include nanoscience and nanoengineering.) Past efforts have utilized several strategies, including simple term search for the prefix nano, complex lexical and citation-based approaches, and bootstrapping techniques. This research introduces a modularized Boolean approach to defining nanotechnology which has been applied to several research and patenting databases. …

Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen Durch „Intelligente Umgebungen“, Michael Friedewald, Ralf Lindner

Michael Friedewald

Mit der umfassenden drahtlosen Vernetzung und Computerisierung von Alltagsgegenständen und Umgebungen werden nicht nur neuartige Anwendungen möglich, sondern auch zahlreiche Risiken erzeugt. Soll Ambient Intelligence (AmI) ein Erfolg werden, ist es erforderlich, angemessene Maß- nahmen zu ergreifen, um Privatsphäre, Sicherheit oder Vertrauen in den jeweiligen Anwendungskontexten zu gewährleisten. Dabei besteht die Herausforderung darin, frühzeitig Vorkehrungen gegen Risiken zu entwickeln, die noch nicht manifest sind. Im Rahmen des EU-Projekts „Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence“ wurden Szenarien entwickelt, mit deren Hilfe poten- zielle Risiken in einer frühen Phase der Technikentwicklung identifiziert wurden. Der Beitrag skizziert die angewandte Szenarienmethode, präsentiert die …

Strategically Managing Resources And Revenue, Christine G. Springer

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

The author reflects on the use of strategic management in the success of the United States Postal Service. She states that the U.S. Postal Service has used the breakthrough productivity scheme to reduce mail-processing costs and address retail locations and bulk-mail areas. She believes that the service is committed in gaining sustained success through the scheme and in serving its customers effectively.

System Analysis Of The Uri Hurricane Preparedness Plan, Rebecca Harlow

Senior Honors Projects

If a hurricane were to hit URI in the upcoming fall semester what would happen? This project is a thorough evaluation of the current URI plan, how it works, how it doesn’t and who has the answers. The project is framed from an information systems perspective. The analysis of the system is based on where vital information is stored, how it is communicated when needed and who is involved. To find the answers to these questions, in depth interviews were conducted with key emergency personnel. Among them are URI’s Director of Safety and Risk, J Kevin Culley, Major Baker of …

Community Service Intiatives Of Medical Students, Kerri I. Aronson

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This Honors Capstone Project focuses on community service projects of medical students. Extensive research was done on the types of community service programs that exist in medical schools. The types of programs were divided into four different categories representing the various ways that schools conduct their community service initiatives. Schools may have multiple types of programs, and a combination of any of these programs is offered at many institutions. This project also examines nationally recognized programs and the awards received for excellence in community service initiatives.

The study was completed in collaboration with SUNY Upstate Medical University (UMU). A close …

Resultados De La Encuesta De Percepción Entre Ciudadanos Estadounidenses Y Canadienses Residentes En México, Rodrigo Garcia-Verdu

Rodrigo Garcia-Verdu

Esta presentación resume los principales resultados de una encuesta de percepción entre ciudadanos estadounidenses y canadienses residentes en México levantada a través de Internet por la Unidad de Seguros, Pensiones y Seguridad Social de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público de México en 2008. El objetivo de la encuesta fue ayudar en el diseño de una estrategia que permita la atracción a Mexico de un mayor número de ciudadanos extranjeros para efectos de migración durante el retiro y de turismo médico.

Nrc’S Decision Process: Judging The Safety Of A Proposed Repository, Janet Kotra

Native American Forum on Nuclear Issues

Abstract:

-Provide an overview of the role of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) at Yucca Mountain

-Describe the process NRC will use to decide whether or not to authorize construction of a repository at Yucca Mountain

-Explain options and highlight important milestones that apply to Tribes as potential participants in NRC’s process

The Politic 2008 Fall, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.