Turner Business

Turner Business has kept up with the professional accomplishments of former Turner College student Tamara Todorova , now an associate professor of economics at American University in Bulgaria (AUB), Todorova earned an MBA from the Turner College in 1996 and then went on to earn a doctorate in international economics from the University of Economics - Varna in 2001. She has been on the faculty at AUB since August of 2000. Our post of 18 January 2024 reported that Todorova published a study in the International Journal of Business Performance Management investigating how corporate culture helps to economize on the transaction costs of internal organization. Ten months later, on 22 October 2024, we reported that she earned promotion to full professor at AUB. Lastly, back in February of this year we posted that Todorova published a study in Economies that provides a mathematical approach to understand the effect of demand shifters such as consumer income and the level of advertising ...

Turner College economist Frank Mixon and Steven Caudill of Auburn University recently inked a deal with Nova Science Publishers out of Hauppauge, New York, to produce a new scholarly book titled Mixture Models: Statistical Foundations, Estimation Strategies, and Applications . Mixture models, and their latent class model representatives, are powerful statistical techniques used to uncover hidden, unobserved subgroups (classes) within a broader population. Both models assume that the overall population is a mixture of multiple distinct subpopulations. Because class membership is unobserved, the models estimate the probability that an individual belongs to each class, effectively making them probabilistic, model-based clustering methods. Mixon has published several books over his career, with the most recent being a 2025 book with Turner College accounting professor Jasmine Bordere titled The Beauty Premium in Academe: An Economic Approach . In 2020, Mixon and Laura Ahlstrom of the Uni...

The rapid growth of unstructured data has driven the widespread adoption of LSM-tree-based key-value stores (KV stores).  The write amplification resulting from compaction in LSM-trees causes a performance bottleneck. Existing solutions attempt  to address this issue through key-value separation strategies. However, these studies fail to optimize the memory components  of LSM-trees or provide efficient garbage collection (GC) strategies that achieve high performance while minimizing CPU  overhead. These limitations motivated TSYS School computer scientist Yi Zhou  and researchers from Anhui University,  Zhongguancun Laboratory and Auburn University  to propose a GPGPU-empowered gradient data hierarchy and key-value separation  for optimizing KV stores, named GDH+. In a study set to appear in a forthcoming issue of ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization , Zhou et al. utilize GPGPU acceleration for sorting and lushing operations, op...

Turner College professor of management Phil Bryant recently surpassed 3,500 career Google Scholar citations. Additionally, Google Scholar reports that his i10-index is equal to 15, meaning that Bryant has published 15 studies that have each garnered at least 10 citations. Google Scholar also reports an additional metric. This is a scholar’s h-index, which is the largest number, h, of a scholar’s publications that have each garnered at least h citations. Bryant’s h-index is 14, meaning that his 14 most-cited studies have each generated at least 14 citations. Bryant's top-cited publication is a 2010 study on retaining talent that appears in Academy of Management Perspectives . Another piece on the same subject – this one appearing in a 2013 issue of Compensation and Benefits Review – has garnered the second-most citations over Bryant’s career. Each of these studies was co-authored with David Allen of the University of Memphis, while the first of the two was also written with James V...

A new study by Turner College finance professor Gisung Moon and  Hongbok Lee of Western Illinois University  examines the capital budgeting techniques presented in financial management textbooks published by major U.S. publishers, focusing on the types of cash flows and discount rates, and then  proposes improvements to traditional capital budgeting techniques .  The study finds that textbooks typically evaluate a project's net cash flows using the firm's weighted average cost of capital (WACC). This method is valid only when the project's net cash flows have the same systematic risk as the firm's net cash flows. However, this assumption often does not hold. To address this, Moon and Lee propose using dual discount rates for the project's operating cash flows and expected future investment outlays. Specifically, the project's operating cash flows should be discounted at the firm's WACC or at a rate that reflects the systematic risk associated with those cas...

Turner College alum Julissa Santoyo recently joined the Young Leaders Council with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta. The Young Leaders Council  is a board of young professionals dedicated to supporting and empowering Atlanta’s youth through mentorship and community impact. "I am honored to be part of an inspiring group and excited for what’s ahead," Santoyo stated. Julissa is a commercial banker at Synovus.