Economics Commons^™

Part 3: Earn While You Learn: The Apprentice School At Newport News Shipbuilding, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis And Policy

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

The Apprentice School at Newport News Shipbuilding is not only one of the nation’s premier schools for educating and training workers, but it also stands as an example of how 21st-century learning can occur in the region. In this chapter, we look at the apprenticeship model and delve into the unique aspects of The Apprentice School that have made it successful.

Part 4: All In: Casinos, Online Betting And The Future Of Gambling In Hampton Roads, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis And Policy

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

In 1987, Virginia voters approved the state lottery, bringing legalized gambling to the Commonwealth. Fast forward to 2021: Virginians can now buy lottery tickets online, place sports bets on their phones and wager in historical horse racing parlors. Now, with casinos opening soon in Norfolk and Portsmouth, as well as Bristol, Danville and, likely, Richmond, we discuss the benefits and costs of casinos in Hampton Roads

Part 6: The Decline Of Local Journalism, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis And Policy

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

Local journalism is in peril. Newspapers all over the country are reducing coverage, cutting staff, abandoning physical newsrooms or shuttering operations altogether. The United States has lost fully one-fourth of its newspapers since 2004, including 70 dailies and more than 2,000 weeklies and other nondaily papers. Hampton Roads has not escaped these cutbacks. We discuss the future of local journalism in Hampton Roads.

Part 7: Securing Release: Cash Bail In Hampton Roads, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis & Policy

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

On any given day in 2019, on average, there were more pretrial inmates per 100,000 residents in Hampton Roads than in Virginia or the United States. To secure their release from jail, many inmates must provide collateral in the form of a secured bond. Now, with momentum building for reducing or eliminating cash bail in the Commonwealth, we estimate the costs and benefits of cash bail reform for cities and counties in Hampton Roads.

Part 5: Whither Old Dominion University?, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis And Policy

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

The University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and College of William & Mary historically have played important roles in the Commonwealth. They have set impressive records in admitting and graduating talented students who (predictably) do well after they leave these campuses. Nevertheless, the future viability and cohesion of the Commonwealth in this century will more likely be determined on campuses like Old Dominion University, for it is there that the critical social mobility challenge is being addressed in a meaningful way. We explore what the future may hold for ODU.

Technological Innovation Research: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach, Yu Sun, Zhaoyuan Yu, Ling Li, Yong Chen, Mikhail Yu Kataev, Haiqing Yu, Hecheng Wang

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

The paper explores the relationship among technological innovation, technological trajectory transition, and firms’ innovation performance. Technological innovation is studied from the perspectives of innovation novelty and innovation openness. Technological trajectory transition is categorized into creative cumulative technological trajectory transition and creative disruptive technological trajectory transition. A structural equation model is developed and tested with data collected by surveying 366 Chinese firms. The results indicate that both innovation novelty and innovation openness positively affects creative cumulative technological trajectory transition as well as creative disruptive technological trajectory transition. Innovation openness and creative disruptive technological trajectory transition both positively affect firms’ innovation performance. …

2021 State Of The Commonwealth Report, Vinod Agarwal, Barbara Blake, Steve Daniel, Ashley Desilva, Nikki Johnson, James V. Koch, Tim Komarek, Feng Lian, Sharon Lomax, Christian Manty, Janet Molinaro, Brendan O'Hallarn, Terry Parker, Golbarg Roghani Araghi, Jake Zalewski, Robert Mcnab

State of the Commonwealth Reports

This is Old Dominion University’s seventh annual State of the Commonwealth Report. While it represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, the report does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion, its president, Brian O. Hemphill, Ph.D., the Board of Visitors, the Strome College of Business or the generous donors who support the activities of the Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy.

With the 2021 election in the rearview mirror, the question now becomes: Where does Virginia go from here? Our work seeks to contribute to this conversation without glossing over the …

Part 2: A Recovery At Different Speeds: Virginia's Metropolitan Areas, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis & Policy, Old Dominion University

State of the Commonwealth Reports

Virginia’s economic recovery in 2021 has been driven by the performance of some, but not all, of its metropolitan areas. While Hampton Roads and Richmond have lagged the performance of the state and nation since the onset of the pandemic, smaller metros like Blacksburg and Winchester have recovered jobs more quickly. As we near the end of 2021, we discuss how Virginia’s metros have fared over the last 24 months and present the challenges for creating growth across the Commonwealth in the coming years.

Exploring The Formation Mechanism Of Radical Technological Innovation: An Mlp Approach, Yun Sun, Hecheng Wang, Haiqing Yu, Yong Chen, Mikhail Yu Kataev, Ling Li

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper identifies three stages in the radical technological innovation process, namely formation process in niches, breaking out of niches and entering regimes, and new regime formation. It then adopts Multi-level Perspective (MLP) to explore the formation process, operating mechanism, breakthrough path, and impact factors of radical technological innovation. A three-phase model, which includes formation of radical innovation, breakout of radical innovation, and new regimes construction, is proposed to analyze radical technological innovation. The model is adopted in a case study to analyze the leapfrogging development of technologies in China’s mobile communication industry. This paper enriches technological innovation theory and …

Behavioral Public Finance And Budgeting: New Approaches To Old Questions?, Salvador Espnosa, Kenneth A. Kriz, Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) The growing interest in the use of behavioral insights in the study of public administration and policy is contributing to the emergence of behavioral public administration (James et al., 2017). This subfield focuses on the “analysis of public administration from the micro-level perspective of individual behavior” (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017, p. 45). For some scholars, this approach offers interesting opportunities to further the study of perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of citizens, public sector staff, or public managers (Tummers, et al., 2016). The combination of behavioral theory and experimental approaches can improve the standing of the field of public …

Fixed Costs And The Division Of Labor, Haiwen Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

How market size and the level of coordination costs determine the degree of specialization is studied in an infinite horizon model with the amount of capital determined endogenously. Firms producing the same intermediate good engage in oligopolistic competition and choose the degree of specialization of their technologies to maximize profits. A more specialized technology is a technology with a lower marginal cost, but a higher fixed cost. Interestingly, the relationship between the level of coordination costs and a firm’s degree of specialization is ambiguous. A firm in a country with a larger market size, more patient citizens, or a higher …

Developing An Institutional Arrangement For A Whole-Of-Government And Whole-Of-Community Approach To Regional Adaptation To Sea Level Rise: The Hampton Roads Pilot Project, Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf, J. Gail Nicula, Burton St. John Iii, Meagan M. Jordan, Michelle Covi, Carol Considine, Marina Saitgalina, Joshua Behr

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

Adaptation to sea level rise (SLR) requires coordination among local, state, and federal entities and collaboration across governments, nonprofits, businesses, and residents. This coordination and collaboration are reflected in institutional arrangements associated with a whole-of-government and whole-of-community approach to regional adaptation. This study analyzes the development of an interlocal agreement (ILA), the Hampton Roads Sea Level Rise Preparedness and Resilience Intergovernmental Planning Pilot Project (the Pilot Project), as an example of such an arrangement. This study assesses how factors throughout three phases of ILA development (initiation, implementation, and execution) influence outcomes and effectiveness. Drawing upon participant observation, document analysis, survey …

Local Fiscal Adjustments From Depopulation: Evidence From The Post–Cold War Defense Contraction, Timothy M. Komarek, Gary A. Wagner

Economics Faculty Publications

In this paper, we estimate the long-term causal effect of population losses on local government revenue, expenditure, and debt by exploiting a quasi-exogenous change that reduced the number of US military personnel by about 40 percent between the late 1980s and 2000. Aggregating across governmental units within commuting zones, we find that real per capita total revenues and expenditures remained unchanged for remaining citizens. At the same time, however, we note several important compositional effects. First, local governments appear to have offset reductions in state intergovernmental aid by increasing property tax revenues. Second, they significantly shifted the composition of expenditures …

Systematizing Confidence In Open Research And Evidence (Score), Nazanin Alipourfard, Beatrix Arendt, Daniel M. Benjamin, Noam Benkler, Michael Bishop, Mark Burstein, Martin Bush, James Caverlee, Yiling Chen, Chae Clark, Anna Dreber Almenberg, Timothy M. Errington, Fiona Fidler, Nicholas Fox, Aaron Frank, Hannah Fraser, Scott Friedman, Ben Gelman, James Gentile, Jian Wu, Et Al., Score Collaboration

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Assessing the credibility of research claims is a central, continuous, and laborious part of the scientific process. Credibility assessment strategies range from expert judgment to aggregating existing evidence to systematic replication efforts. Such assessments can require substantial time and effort. Research progress could be accelerated if there were rapid, scalable, accurate credibility indicators to guide attention and resource allocation for further assessment. The SCORE program is creating and validating algorithms to provide confidence scores for research claims at scale. To investigate the viability of scalable tools, teams are creating: a database of claims from papers in the social and behavioral …

The Drug Overdose Epidemic Seen Through Different Lenses, Barbara Blake Gonzalez, Richard Cebula, James V. Koch

Economics Faculty Publications

The age-adjusted death rate from drug overdoses in the United States per 100,000 individuals rose from 6.8 in 2010 to 17.1 in 2018. The most common explanation offered is the deaths of despair hypothesis. We identify additional factors that have contributed to the rise in drug overdose deaths in cities and counties. Methods: We utilize a period fixed effects model with a multi-variate panel data set for 94 independent cities and counties in Virginia for the period 2008 through 2017. Results: The drug overdose mortality rate is: (a) an increasing function (prob.

The Relationship Between The Earning Of Career And Technical Industry Credentials And The Virginia Economy, Anjanette Mcfadden Hendricks

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

Nationally, the labor market is calling out for workers to fill the increasing number of job vacancies, but those qualified, skilled, and able to fill them are limited in supply or retiring in large numbers. As America’s key industries offer high salaries in return for candidates with the necessary skills and credentials to fill their vacancies, the skills learned and third-party industry credentials earned in secondary Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs seem to make a perfect fit for the student, employer, and the economy. However, unlike the favored US educational model of the four-year degree, the continued outdated perception …

Macroeconomic Aspects Of Maintenance Optimization Of Critical Infrastructures, S. A. Timashev, A. V. Bushinskaya

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The main goal of maintenance is prevention, timely detection and elimination of failures and damage. From the point of view of critical infrastructures (CIs), the main purpose of their maintenance is to increase the safety of CIs and / or to ensure life safety. CIs should be optimal in terms of their purpose, cost, as a source of income and profit at all stages of their life cycle, and also acceptable in terms of possible loss of human lives or injuries. The paper considers the assessment of necessary optimal investments in the maintenance (time interval between subsequent maintenance), to increase …

Drug-Overdose Death Rates: The Economic Misery Explanation And Its Alternatives, Barbara Blake Gonzalez, Richard Cebula, James V. Koch

Economics Faculty Publications

‘Deaths of despair’ is the most commonly cited explanation for the 151% increase in drug-overdose deaths that occurred in the USA between 2010 and 2018. We use panel data describing 84 Virginia cities and counties to assess the validity of the deaths of despair hypothesis and alternate explanations that focus on disability rates, travel time to work, urban vs. rural location, educational attainment, racial and ethnic characteristics, the influence of other health conditions such as obesity, and supply-side factors that include pill availability and pharmacy market shares. We find deaths of despair to be only a partial explanation for the …

The Effects Of Ceo Dismissal Risk And Skills On Risky Corporate Decisions And Ceo Compensation, Son T. Dang

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation consists of three distinct essays on the effects of CEO dismissal risk on M&A megadeal decisions, the association between CEO compensation and generalist managerial ability in the presence of CEO dismissal risk, and the alignment of the initial compensation of new CEOs following CEO dismissals with their managerial ability.

In Essay 1, I study the link between CEO dismissal risk and risky M&A decisions and find that higher-dismissal-risk CEOs engage in more M&A megadeals than their counterparts. Such megadeal transactions lead to lower acquirer post-M&A abnormal returns, suggesting that risky investment decisions are driven by CEOs’ career concerns. …

Why Do Nonprofits Fail? A Quantitative Study Of Form 990 Information In The Years Preceding Closure, Mackenzie Arbogust

School of Public Service Theses & Dissertations

Nonprofit organizations are an important piece of the community and economy in the United States. Each year, nonprofit organizations close their doors and stop providing services to the community. While there are large amounts of literature around financial health and vulnerability and governance best practices of nonprofit organizations, few of the studies have ever looked specifically at failed organizations. In general, the end stages of the life cycle of nonprofit organizations have not been well studied and are not well understood. This study draws on resource dependency theory and institutional theory to identify financial and governance factors that may serve …

Two Essays On The Microstructure Of The Housing Market: Agents' Diffused Effort And Sellers' Behavior Bias, Zhaohui Li

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

For the first essay, we generalize the classic Williams [1998 RFS] brokerage model by introducing the diffused effort. That is, the agent can cross-utilize effort spending on one listing to another one. Besides, the agent can manage heterogeneous housing assets. One counterintuitive finding in Williams’ paper is the absence of the agency problem. As a special case in our model, we recover the agency problem. We examine the positive externality due to the diffused effort and show that it depends on the agent’s inventory size. Hence there exists a trade-off between agents’ effort spending on existing listings and on finding …

The Accumulation Of It Capability And Its Long-Term Effect On Financial Performance, Jin Ho Kim

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Many scholars have been studying information technology (IT) capability and its impact on business performance. However, it has been debated whether the IT capability influences firm performance because prior literature shows mixed results. To understand this phenomenon, I performed two studies in this research, placed in two parts. First, by deploying the new concept of accumulation of IT capability, I attempted to reinvestigate the relationship between IT capability and business performance. Next, I examined what factors influence the accumulation of IT capability. In the first part, I suggested two novel constructs that measure the extent of the accumulation of IT …

Renegotiation Of Joint Venture Contracts: The Influence Of Boards Of Directors And Prior Ties As Alternative Governance Mechanisms, Valérie Duplat, Elko Klijn, Jeffrey Reuer, Henri Dekker

Management Faculty Publications

Research on alliance governance has pointed out that joint ventures (JVs) are particularly complex forms of collaboration. Partnering firms therefore often face difficulties in anticipating contingencies and collaborative behaviors at the contract negotiation stage. When initial JV contracts are incomplete, renegotiation represents a key strategic opportunity for enhancing contractual safeguards or coordination guidelines over the course of the joint venture. Costs and risks entailed by renegotiating JV arrangements at a later stage are far from trivial, however. Existing research on alliances suggests that practitioners have alternative relational and formal governance solutions at their disposal for handling possible inefficiencies caused by …

How Does The World Bank Influence The Development Policy Priorities Of Low-Income And Lower-Middle Income Countries?, Stephen Knack, Bradley C. Parks, Ani Harutyunyan, Matthew Dilorenzo

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

This study investigates the World Bank’s use of lending and non-lending instruments to affect the policy priorities of developing countries. In a typical year, the World Bank lends more than $30 billion to its client countries. It also spends approximately $200 million on the provision of analytical and advisory products each year. However, insufficiently granular data on the nature, timing, and distribution of these analytical and advisory products and the policy priorities of client countries has made it difficult for policymakers and scholars to understand which World Bank instruments are most useful for effectuating change in the direction of government …

Essay 1: How We Feel: The Role Of Macro-Economic Sentiment In Advertising Spending-Sales Relationship; Essay 2: It Was The Best Of Times; It Was The Worst Of Times: The Effect Of Emotional Uncertainty And Arousal On Healthy Food Choices, Leila Khoshghadam

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Essay 1: Controversies regarding the advertising spending-sales relationship have spawned many studies in marketing. Previous research on macroeconomic influencers of this relationship has focused mostly on objective macroeconomic indicators such as cyclical contraction and expansion. Extending these previous studies, the current research argues that sales response to advertising is also contingent upon the pervasive feelings present in the macroeconomic environment, above and beyond the influence from objective macroeconomic factors. Specifically, it argues that future outlook negativity and uncertainty in macroeconomic sentiment can affect the ad spending-sales relationship. Analyzing sales and advertising spending data for salty snacks in conjunction with macroeconomic …

2020 State Of The Commonwealth Report, Vinod Agarwal, Barbara Blake, Steve Daniel, Ashley Desilva, Addie Gregory, Elizabeth Janik, Nikki Johnson, James V. Koch, Tim Komarek, Feng Lian, Sharon Lomax, Janet Molinaro, Brendan O'Hallarn, Bailey Park, Terry Parker, Jay Walker, Hannah White

State of the Commonwealth Reports

This is Old Dominion University’s sixth annual State of the Commonwealth Report. While it represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, the report does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion, its president, John R. Broderick, the Board of Visitors, the Strome College of Business or the generous donors who support the activities of the Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy.

Although our devotion to this work remains steadfast, our enthusiasm, admittedly, has been dampened by the COVID-19 pandemic and the toll it has taken on the Commonwealth and nation. Our work …

Front Matter- 2020 State Of The Commonwealth Report, Center For Economic Analysis And Policy, Old Dominion University

State of the Commonwealth Reports

Cover, front matter, table of contents, sponsors, and other materials for the 2020 State of the Commonwealth Report authored by the Center for Economic Analysis and Policy at Old Dominion University.

Life In Hampton Roads Survey Press Release #7: Perceptions Of Employment And Economy, Social Science Research Center, Old Dominion University

Life in Hampton Roads Survey Report

Life in Hampton Roads: Employment, the Economy and COVID-19

This year’s survey included general questions about employment and economy as well at the impact of COVID-19 on work conditions. These data provide insight into how residents in Hampton Roads perceive the economy and how work conditions may have changed as a result. This year’s survey also included some general questions about diversity in the workplace.

Front Matter: The State Of The Region: Hampton Roads 2020, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis And Policy, Old Dominion University

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

Cover, Front Matter, Table of Contents, Sponsors, and other materials for the 2020 The State of the Region report authored by the Center for Economic Analysis and Policy at Old Dominion University

Part 1: A Shock To The System: Covid-19 And Hampton Roads, Dragas Center For Economic Analysis And Policy

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

COVID-19 changed how we view the Hampton Roads economy. In January 2020, the region was projected to grow faster than the nation, there were more unfilled jobs than unemployed workers and boosts in defense spending brightened our economic future. By April, however, businesses were closing, jobs were being lost and residents were under a stay-at-home order. We assess the economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and examine prospects for the coming year.