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New Study by Turner College's Frank Mixon Examines Impact of Global Economic and Political Uncertainty on Economic Growth in Eastern Europe

Most countries experience some degree of economic and political uncertainty. Whether these uncertainties originate from domestic or international sources, they significantly impact economic performance. For example, an increase in uncertainty leads to a “wait-and-see” response from private firms, whose investment decisions are important to the overall macroeconomy. Similarly, households tend to confront uncertainty by reducing consumption and increasing savings to maintain some degree of economic security. In addition to economic and political uncertainty (or government uncertainty), economic growth is also influenced by the degree of economic freedom in a country. Economic freedom encompasses key institutional factors such as property rights, the rule of law, trade openness, regulatory efficiency, and limited government intervention, to name a few. Greater economic freedom promotes economic growth by encouraging business sector investment and fostering competition in markets.  How...
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Turner College's Jasmine Bordere Records First A-Level Journal Publication

Back in early September of 2025 Turner Business reported on a study by the Turner College's Jasmine Bordere and Frank Mixon , along with Syracuse University's Shane Sanders, investigating the link between overall athletic success at the institution level and various indicators of the quality of institutions’ incoming freshmen. More specifically, the study explores the association between institutions’ Learfield Cup performances, which capture success across all of an institution's sports programs, and the SAT scores, ACT scores and high school GPAs of their incoming freshman classes. Econometric results presented in this study suggest that marginal improvements in an institution’s overall athletic performance across all men’s and women’s sports are associated with freshmen SAT and ACT scores that are, on average, upwards of 21 and 0.53 points higher, respectively, as well as with a high school grade point average across the incoming freshman class that is about 0.1 point...

CSU's First Summer 2026 New Student Orientation in the Books

The CSU Office of Academic Success Coaching had an incredible time hosting the very first orientation of summer 2026. Turner College affiliated c oaches Shaneka Thrash and Elizabeth Chess were able to connect, share insights, and jumpstart this academic journey with everyone. " It was absolutely wonderful to finally put faces with names. We had some truly great conversations, shared plenty of laughs, and of course had a lot of fun along the way," Chess explained. " To all of our incoming students: We are so incredibly excited for your journey ahead and are here to support you every step of the way. Let’s make it a fantastic semester."

TSYS School Student-Athlete Layla Albright Named to Girls in the Game Class of 2026

Entering its 11th year of celebrating the athletic and academic success of its female student-athletes, the CSU Department of Athletics recently announced its Girls in the Game Class of 2026.  The program recognizes a female student-athlete from each of CSU's eight NCAA Division II women's sports teams. All honorees receive a one-year academic scholarship and a specially designed Girls in the Game medallion. This year's class includes Layla Albright  (pictured above, fourth from left),  a sophomore cross country athlete from Columbus majoring in cybersecurity. "We are incredibly impressed by the dedication and resilience shown by the student-athletes chosen to represent our teams this year," said Director of Athletics Justin Hay. "These young women exemplify the core values and leadership qualities of the Girls in the Game program and Columbus State University. They demonstrate excellence not only in competition on the field and court, but also in their acade...

Turner College Grad Tamara Todorova Adds to Her List of Academic Publications

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 Inks Deal with Nova Science Publishing on New Scholarly Book Project

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...

New Research by TSYS School's Yi Zhou Proposes New Data Hierarchy for Optimizing KV Stores

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...