The 2024-25 Academic Year in Research: Part 1

The 2024-25 academic year saw a number of successes on the research front. Starting in May of 2024, Turner College economist Frank Mixon kicked things off with a publication in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology examining the factors influencing the tendency of members of the U.S. House of Representative to either shirk (i.e., skip) the vote on HR 965, a 2020 resolution that authorized proxy voting in the U.S. House of Representatives as a way avoiding spread of COVID-19 in the Congress, or to vote in favor of the resolution (i.e., HR 965) allowing for the proxy vote. The study reports that female Representatives were 4.3 to 5.5 percentage points more likely to skip the vote on HR 965 than were their male counterparts, and that older Representatives were about 4.7 percentage points more likely to skip the vote on HR 965 that were their younger counterparts. Most importantly, Representatives who generally tend to skip votes exhibited a significantly greater tendency to skip the vote on HR 965. Results from a second-step model indicated that voting Representatives exhibiting the highest probability of skipping the vote on HR 965, as indicated by predictions from the primary model, were 13.4 percentage points more likely to vote in favor of HR 965 than were voting Representatives facing lower probabilities of skipping the vote on HR 965. As the study concludes, the expected inclination to shirk one’s participation in legislative activities in this case is directly related to one’s support for a resolution that would provide political cover for that same type of participatory shirking behavior in the future.

     TSYS School computer scientist Riduan Abid added to the list with his June 2024 study in Results in Engineering that introduces a Cloud-based smart irrigation system to connect numerous small-scale smart farms and centralize pertinent data. Abid's system optimizes irrigation water usage through comprehensive big data collection, storage, and analysis. The study asserts that leveraging the insights from these data can facilitate informed decision-making regarding water management, thereby fostering conservation efforts, particularly in arid regions. Additionally, the study explores weather prediction services to enhance irrigation control, particularly during intermittent rainy periods, within a real-world testbed powered by solar energy. The testbed incorporates a sophisticated big data management system that showcases a Smart Farm prototype leveraging the Internet of Things, embedded systems, low-cost wireless sensor networks, NI CompactRIO controller, and Cloud computing. Encouragingly, the results demonstrate tangible improvements in water conservation, while the deployment methodology outlined in the study provides a clear roadmap that can be readily adapted for similar research endeavors.

     Frank Mixon followed his May 2024 study highlighted above with two additional May 2024 studies, both in Applied Economics. The first addresses the paucity of rankings of women in the economics profession by presenting citations-based rankings of women economists in the U.S. South. The study ranks women economists across three separate metrics: total citations garnered by a scholar's research, each scholar's h-index, and each scholar's g-index. A scholar’s h-index is the largest number, h, of a scholar’s publications that have each garnered at least h citations. A scholar’s g-index is the largest number, g, of a scholar’s publications that have collectively garnered at least g-squared citations. According to the results of the study, Maureen Cropper of the University of Maryland is the top-ranked woman in the U.S. South. Cropper's research has been cited more than 23,500 times over the course of her academic career. Rounding out the top five women are Rachel Kranton of Duke University with more than 19,850 citations, Catherine Eckel of Texas A&M University with more than 19,650 citations, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan of the University of Maryland with more than 18,000 citations, and Nora Lustig of Tulane University with more than 15,825 citations. Mixon's second May 2024 study in Applied Economics involves micro-data research on the impact of 20th century first-generation rent controls in Europe using data on apartment rents in Florence, Italy, from 1950 to 1963. Hedonic pricing regressions presented in the study indicate that controlled rents per room are €22.13 lower than uncontrolled rents per room, which, although substantial, is a bit smaller than the raw difference in mean rent per room. The paper also examines the pricing of a hypothetical apartment with mean characteristics over all apartments in the sample, both controlled and uncontrolled, evaluated at hedonic prices in order to provide year-by-year estimated controlled and uncontrolled rents. Near the beginning of the period under study (i.e., 1950) uncontrolled rents were about 12 to 13 times higher than controlled rents. By the end of the period (i.e., 1963) this ratio had fallen to about three. 

     An August of 2024 study in Electronics by TSYS School computer scientists Jianhua Yang and Lixin Wang explores the use of network traffic distribution to detect stepping-stone intrusion. The study acknowledges that over the past three decades, stepping-stone intrusion has become a professional and primary way used by intruders to launch their attacks given that it offers protection via a long transmission control protocol connection chain. The paper proposes a novel approach using the distribution of round-trip time (RTT) of network traffic to detect stepping-stone intrusion." Among the advantages of the approach developed by Yang and Wang are (1) its ability to bring down false-positive detection errors since it belongs to a network-based detection method, (2) its ability to function as intended without having to collect packets from the beginning to the end of establishing a connection chain, (3) its ability to resist intruders’ chaff-perturbation manipulation, and (4) it achievement of a high detection rate.

     Rounding out the first four months of the 2024-25 academic year we return to another May of 2024 study by Frank Mixon appearing in International Advances in Economic Research that explores the intricacies of the associations between the stock market and the macroeconomy. The study examines the lead-lag relationships between three stock indices — the Standard & Poor’s 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Nasdaq Composite — and three key macroeconomic variables, namely the Industrial Production Index, total non-farm employment, and the Consumer Price Index. The findings point to a strong, positive correlation between U.S. stock indices and the business cycle between 1990 and 2020, with stock markets typically lagging industrial production by one to three months. The analysis also reveals that the associations between the U.S. stock market indices and inflation have changed noticeably over time—in the 1980s and 1990s, they were negatively correlated, whereas, during the 2000s and 2010s, they were strongly and positively correlated. Lastly, the study also presents some evidence of a negative association between the real economy and stock market cycles during the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, the three stock indices have exhibited strong co-movement throughout the last 40 years.