An examination of a cross-section of 102 nations reveals marked differences in the performance of their competition policy enforcement agencies. Likely explanatory factors considered include gross domestic product per capita, the intensity of competition, physical size, the level of corruption, national experience with a modern antitrust law and whether the common law prevails. Competition policy agencies operate poorly in jurisdictions characterized by corruption and poor competitive intensity. In fact, differences in levels of corruption and variations in the intensity of competition account for approximately 78 percent of the observed variance in agency performance. Group characteristics, however, vary by region and have varying impact on the observed performance gap. Rather than a generalized approach to the promotion and diffusion of competition policies, our results suggest that distinct policies for each region are likely to be more successful.

More and more universities are pursuing interdisciplinary academic activities that span across department and college boundaries. Administrative structures to facilitate such programs are difficult to establish within traditional university frameworks consisting of disciplinary departments and colleges. Often interdisciplinary programs are housed in a traditional disciplinary department or college, or in a standalone center reporting to a college dean or the provost. The difficulty of these structures is obtaining broad buy-in from faculty across departments and having disciplinary degree programs include interdisciplinary coursework.
To overcome the difficulties described above, an innovative shared department structure that fosters collaborations to advance interdisciplinary education has been deployed at the University of New Haven. Three shared departments have been established over the last two years: (1) a college-wide department to support interdisciplinary coursework in the first two years of engineering programs; (2) a university-wide department to support entrepreneurship and innovation; and (3) a university-wide department to support health sciences.
The shared departments typically have faculty whose tenure home is a traditional disciplinary department. Faculty membership is based on interest and activity level in teaching interdisciplinary courses, participating in interdisciplinary co-curricular activities, and performing interdisciplinary research. A few faculty members may be appointed full-time in a shared department. Like traditional departments, the shared departments have chairs to lead and coordinate activities. Faculty membership can vary from year-to-year depending on their level of activity in the shared department. The shared departments are responsible for approving interdisciplinary courses within their jurisdiction. The chairs of the departments are responsible for reviewing the performance of instructors teaching the interdisciplinary courses, and for providing feedback to disciplinary department chairs on the performance of faculty who are members of the shared department.
To date the shared departments have facilitated the following: (1) an Entrepreneurial Engineering Living-Learning Community (LLC) for freshmen; (2) an Innovation and Entrepreneurship LLC for sophomores; (3) an integrated technical communications program across all engineering and computer science programs; (4) an integrated approach to developing entrepreneurial thinking in students across all engineering and computer science programs; (5) the development and teaching of courses on entrepreneurship; and (6) startup weekends and a business plan competition with students drawn from across the university.
The detailed structure of the two shared departments and the lessons learned in establishing and operating them is described in this paper.

This paper studies the relationship between housing prices, stock prices, interest rates and aggregate output in the U.S. using monthly data from 1993 to 2014. Evidence from causality tests and a variance decomposition procedure suggest that stock prices have a much larger effect on aggregate output in the U.S. economy than do either housing prices or interest rates. Instead, the wealth effect created by changes in stock prices has a relatively large impact on U.S. aggregate output. Separate estimations and variance decompositions for the sample periods 1993 - 2001, 2002 – 2008 and 2009 – 2014 show that the impact of housing prices relative to stock prices has been waning over time.

This study applies the methodology of a recent study that ranks economics departments at national universities in the U.S. South to economics faculties at regional universities in the same geographic location. Ranking results from a “core” (i.e., the top five faculty researchers) of each institution's economics faculty reveals that Appalachian State University, James Madison University, Southeastern Louisiana University, Trinity University and Loyola University – New Orleans currently maintain the top five economics faculties, respectively, among the approximately 200 regional universities in the U.S. South.

This study investigates the importance of the quality of human capital investment and collegiality (i.e., good colleagues) in achieving the type of acclaim in economics captured by receipt of the Yrjö Jahnsson Award, arguably the second-most prestigious award that a European economist can receive as recognition of the importance of his or her research endeavors. We provide an economic model as a foundation for both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Our results indicate that four institutions, namely the Toulouse School of Economics, University College London, University of Oxford and the London School of Economics generally rank highest in supporting a position of acclaim among academic economics faculties in Europe.

By jointly modeling returns and volatilities, we find that unemployment news has no significant impact on U.S. stock market returns, but instead on stock market volatility. There is also a significantly positive relation between the long-term bond return and unemployment news during economic expansions, indicating that U.S. government bonds might be a hedge against unemployment news. Inflation news affects both stock and bond market returns negatively during expansions. Both unemployment and inflation news surprises also have more impact on volatility during economic recessions than during expansions.

This paper assesses the relative performance of the council-manager versus the two predominant political models of government in Connecticut: Mayor-Council and Selectman forms of government. All three will be assessed in terms of their capability to provide for greater efficiency in Connecticut’s municipalities.

The US and EU have announced negotiations for a free trade agreement to be completed by end of 2014. While tariff barriers between the two entities are limited, their trade is encumbered with non-tariff barriers (NTBs), one of them being their diverging approach to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the agriculture and food industries. The US operates from a science-based perspective while the EU relies on the precautionary principle. This paper reviews the developments of GMOs in both the US and EU and draws on measures outlined in international organizations and recent trade agreements to explore options for the US and EU to reconcile their different perspectives within the framework of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Shift-share analysis is a decomposition technique that is commonly used to measure attributes of regional change. In this method, regional change is decomposed into its relevant functional and competitive parts. This paper introduces traditional shift-share method and its extensions with examples of its applicability and usefulness for program evaluation and development, strategic planning, enrollment management and other traditional functions of higher education administration. To illustrate we provide an appraisal of the impact of demographic and employment changes resulting from the great recession on the MBA program of a regional private university in the state of Connecticut. We establish the validity of our shift-share based analysis with a Google Trends examination of relevant keywords.

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This paper studies the effect of climate change on wheat production in Kansas using annual time series data from 1949 to 2014. For the study, an error correction model is developed in which the price of wheat, the price of oats (substitute good), average annual temperature and average annual precipitation are used as explanatory variables with total output of wheat being the dependent variable. Time series properties of the data series are diagnosed using unit root and cointegration tests. The estimated results suggest that Kansas farmers are supply responsive to both wheat as well as its substitute (oat) prices in the short run as well as in the long run. Climate variables; temperature has a positive effect on wheat output in the short run but an insignificant effect in the long run. Precipitation has a positive effect in the short run but a negative effect in the long run.

We use a behaviorally motivated risk-return optimization framework to shed light on the important link between global supply chain management and investors’ risk-return choice. By improving the transparency and sustainability of the global supply chain, firms can reduce the probability of extreme losses, thus increasing investors’ expected utility and asset valuations. In order to effectively address the growing risks firms face in their global supply chains, systemic change is required. Managers can facilitate this change by increasing transparency and sustainability of their supply chains, especially in the area of carbon emissions reduction.We outline existing programs and tools that are leading the way in this regard.