The major goal of the research presented here is to test the usefulness of a different way of conceptualizing broad regions of the United States. The census regions are often used to group MSAs for various types of studies. The alternative regions are defined based on access to ocean, Great...

Failures may lead to ultimate success in both nature and business. Just as dynamic ecosystems depend on death to replace senescent organisms with vigorous growth, the termination of uneconomic activities is essential to wealth creation. This paper explores the benefits of failures, and uses...

In the absence of other information about the quality of an experience good, the price of a jointly produced search good provides consumers with a signal of the former good’s quality.. This hypothesis provides an explanation for the heretofore unexplained pricing policies found in Barron’s...

History professors have long portrayed Custer’s stand at the Little Bighorn River in terms of the managerial quirks and personality flaws of the central characters. The discussion in Evan Connell’s (1984) book, Son of the Morning Star, illuminates the Last Stand in terms of economic...

Calls for corporate social responsibility are widespread, yet there is no consensus about what it means; this may be its charm. It is possible to distinguish the fiduciary duty owed to shareholders as expressed by Milton Friedman from all other paradigms of corporate responsibility. Friedman...

Using Alabama county data from 1980 and 1990 censuses and store opening dates, this paper presents an econometric study of the impact of the presence of Wal-Mart's on black-white income and unemployment differentials. It is posited that Wal-Mart changes the competitive nature of the labor market...

This paper reports the effect of intra and international conflict on domestic investment in South America from 1950-2000. We combine data from the Penn World Table 6.1 and the Militarized Interstate Dispute Dataset from the Correlates of War project in a spatial investment accelerator model. We...

This paper considers whether student motivation might be impacted by the replacement of a straight (A, B, C, D, F) grading system with a plus/minus system (A, A-, B+ . . . D-, F). The data that are examined are from several undergraduate economics classes at a mid-sized Midwestern university in...

This paper presents a study of errors in forecasting the population of Metropolitan Statistical Areas and the Primary MSAs of Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas and New England MAs. The forecasts are for the year 2000 and are based on a semi-structural model estimated by Mills and...

The relationships between classroom performance and student characteristics such as grade point average and gender have been the subject of much analysis in economic education. Heretofore, student behavior in the economics classroom has not been among the characteristics studied. Using newly...