Turner Business

The forthcoming study on the rise of one-child families in the U.S. by Fady Mansour , a visiting assistant professor of economics in the Turner College, is the first to investigate the economic origins of the issue.  His study, which is set for future publication in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues , uses longitudinal data (1968-2013) from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the effect of absolute income volatility on the decision of having an only-child family .  The results suggest that income volatility is associated with a decrease as large as 26 percentage points in the probability of having a second child for mothers who are in the second quartile of income distribution.  These results support implementation of public policies that reduce the economic insecurity of middle class mothers in the U.S. as these mothers have a higher tendency to limit their family size in response to greater income volatility.

Recently-published research by Turner College economics professor Frank Mixon and his colleagues Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology (Australia) and Kamal Upadhyaya of the University of New Haven explores the link between winning the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and the John Bates Clark Medal, which is awarded annually to an American economist under the age of 40 and is widely considered by academic economists as the discipline’s second-most prestigious honor.  Given that many of the winners of the latter prize go on to later win the former, Mixon and his co-authors examine the link between winning the two awards using data from all previous Clark Medal recipients.   The results of their study, which appears in a 2017 issue of Scientometrics , suggest that a one standard deviation increase (from the mean level) in the “impact” of a Clark Medalist’s scholarly portfolio is enough to reduce the time span between bestowal of these two honors by almost 10...

Turner College associate professor of marketing Ed O’Donnell and colleagues Steven Brown of Georgia Gwinnett College and Lisa Chen of Fort Hays State University break new ground in a recent study on opinion leaders in organizations by presenting evidence from a sample of 646 individuals highlighting the importance of recognizing and enabling an organization’s members whose opinions are sought by their peers.  Their study, published in a 2017 issue of the International Journ al of Organizational Analysis , focuses on the transformational leadership quality of charisma and role modeling to examine the dynamics of the opinion leader-opinion seeker relationship.  They find that organization opinion leadership influences the organization members’ attitudes and perceptions, and, as result, the opinion leader-opinion seeker phenomenon needs to be fostered by the organization’s leadership in much the same way that leadership fosters the organization’s overall culture.