Turner Business

New research by TSYS School computer scientist Yi Zhou and his colleagues Hui Sun of Anhui University, Yajie Deng of Northwestern Polytechnical University, and Xiao Qin of Auburn University explains that persistent memory (PM) bridges the latency and cost gap between dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and solid-state drives (SSD). As these researchers add, within the DRAM–PM–SSD hierarchy, deploying key-value-separated key-value stores (KV-separated stores) is imperative for optimizing system longevity and performance. This architecture mitigates SSD write amplification and preserves PM endurance by minimizing writes. According to Zhou et al., existing KV-separated stores in the DRAM-SSD architecture, however, fail to fully exploit this three-tier hierarchy due to three issues. First, LSM-tree indexes incur high read amplification on PM. While learned indexes offer faster reads, they suffer from severe write-read asymmetry that can undermine overall efficiency in write-intensive work...

New research by Turner College economist Frank Mixon and Spencer Eli Kagan of the University of California – Berkeley examining surfers' responses to the decision by California governmental authorities to close multiple access ramps connected to the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) for months after containment of the 2025 Pacific Palisades fires, which resulted in the loss of access to some of southern California’s high-quality surf breaks, is now set for publication in a 2027 issue of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology . As indicated in our 27-March-2026 post about this study , Mixon and Kagan point out that in response to beach closures, many Los Angeles area surfers migrated to open breaks, thus increasing congestion at these surf breaks. The added congestion caused by the migration tested the social norms that traditionally govern surf break utilization. Thus, as Mixon and Kagan argue, the migration of surfers in response to the California wildfires serves as somewhat ...

In recent posts Turner Business has spotlighted the research endeavors of two of its economics faculty, namely Fady Mansour and Wen Shi . Mansour is currently the Sarah T. Butler Professor of Economics and Director of the Butler Center for Research and Economic Development. Shi is currently an associate professor of economics. As the table below indicates, Mansour earned a PhD in 2017 and his research has thus far garnered 106 Google Scholar citations, while Shi earned a PhD one year earlier, in 2016, and her research has so far picked up 99 Google Scholar citations. The research conducted by each of these faculty has also garnered an h- index of five, meaning that they each have five journal publications that have each earned five or more Google Scholar citations. As the rest of the table above states, Mansour has published 11 journal articles so far. Of these, two are A-level journal pieces and nine are B-level journal papers. Shi has eight journal publications, five of which are A...

Alabama is a high-poverty state with permissive small-dollar credit regulation and one of the largest licensed alternative financial service provider markets in the United States. Using Alabama State Banking Department licensing data for 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2020, new research by Turner College economist Wen Shi , Tuskegee University's  Rui Chen and Robert Zabawa, and Jiayi Xu of Siena University estimates Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood models with high-dimensional fixed effects in order to examine conditional spatial associations between traditional financial institutions, socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, and counts of payday lenders, small-loan providers, and pawnshops. Their models are estimated at census-tract, ZIP-code, and county levels, and two-part hurdle models separate alternative financial service provider presence from conditional intensity. According to their results, lagged credit-union intensity shows the most consistent positive associat...

Published by Springer, Empirical Economics  is an A-rated journal (Australian Business Deans Council) that focuses on high-quality papers that apply advanced econometric or statistical methods to confront economic theory with observed data.  Exemplary topics appearing in the journal are treatment effect estimation, policy evaluation, forecasting, and econometric methods. This year the journal is celebrating its 50th anniversary. In commemoration of this milestone, its most recent issue leads with an expansive bibliometric analysis of the journal's first 50 years. This analysis recognizes top papers appearing in previous issues and scholars who have contributed to the journal's success. One of the diagrams in the article, Figure 9, presents a  network that shows the bibliographic coupling of authors publishing in  Empirical Economics , wherein the nodes are the top individual researchers and the edges are co-authorship or citation  relationships between those res...

A new study by Butler Center Director Fady Mansour ,  Stefani Milovanska-Farrington of Florida Polytechnic University,  Nour Kattih of Middle Tennessee State University  and  Mohammed Saeed of King Abdulaziz University investigates whether the mandatory submission of answers to practice questions improves students’ performance on the practice quizzes and subsequent economics exams. As the study explains, it is well-known that practice helps students learn because taking a quiz or exam requires recalling information – a phenomenon referred to the academic l iterature as the “testing effect.” To explore this effect, Mansour and his co-authors  collected data from five sections (three face-to-face and two online) of an introductory macroeconomics course at a four-year public university located in the southern United States. Three of these five sections were assigned optional test preparation questions before the first exam during the semester, whereas the other tw...

Almost one year ago Turner Business reported on research that was conducted by Turner College economist Frank Mixon , along with colleagues Ján Buleca and Maryna Tatar of the Technical University of Košice, and Ermanno Affuso of the University of South Alabama, evaluating the effects of external shocks, primarily domestic armed conflicts, on the market equilibrium in residential energy and assesses their impact on consumer welfare. Since that time the study has undergone substantial revisions and is forthcoming in a future issue of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy . Their revised study utilizes a  global, rather than local, exposure measure representing annual variation in realized armed conflict activity worldwide. This construction is aligned with the mechanism examined in the paper, according to which worldwide armed conflicts may affect open European energy markets through internationally integrated commodity markets, sanctions, shipping disruptions, insurance...

As regular followers of Turner Business are aware, we often take a look at the Google Scholar citations to the published research of the Turner College business faculty. This post takes a different view of these data by examining the number of Google Scholar citations picked up this calendar year. For example, so far this year research by the 23 faculty making up the corps of business instruction has garnered 796 Google Scholar citations, for an average of 34.6 Google Scholar citations per faculty. When the three administrative are also considered, these numbers are 813 and 31.3, respectively. Next, the 14 faculty comprising the corps of instruction in the Department of Management & Marketing have generated 504 Google Scholar citations so far this year, resulting in an average of 36.0 Google Scholar citations per faculty. After including administrative faculty, these numbers are 508 and 33.9, respectively. Lastly, the nine faculty making up the corps of instruction in the Departme...

Turner College economist Frank Mixon has been invited to guest edit a special issue of Economies titled "Labor Market Institutions." Labor market institutions are the formal and informal rules, organizations and policies that regulate employment, wage-setting and working conditions. Prominent examples in this topic include labor unions, minimum wage legislation, unemployment insurance and employment protection laws that dictate hiring and firing processes.  Economies is an international, peer-reviewed, journal that publishes mainly in the fields of development economics and macroeconomics. It also supports research in health economics, labor economics and regional economics. Stay connected to Turner Business for future posts on this assignment.

A new study by Turner College MISM professor Insung Hwang and Lehigh University's Andreea Kiss, Naomi Rothman and Willy Das  investigates the effects of entrepreneurial subjective ambivalence on a form of adaptive action referred to as venture idea revision. Building on the affect-as-information perspective, Hwang and his co-authors propose that entrepreneurial subjective ambivalence will increase venture idea revision by increasing information search behaviors. The results of a longitudinal, repeated-measures field study based on 175 entrepreneurs in a top incubator program demonstrate that when entrepreneurs experience higher subjective ambivalence (compared to lower ambivalence) in response to mentor feedback about their new ventures, they engage in higher levels of venture idea revision. Hwang et al. theorize and find that this increase in venture idea revision arises because subjective ambivalence is positively associated with more intense and broader information search behav...

With next week's departure of Deborah Kidder  to Kutztown University, where she will serve as dean of the business school, Turner Business decided to re-examine  the Google Scholar citations that are attributed to the research by the Turner College's remaining business faculty. The Turner College currently will have 27 total tenured and tenure-track faculty following Kidder's departure , including three administrators. Hence, the corps of instruction count will stand at 24. The Turner College's remaining corps of instruction is associated with 21,080, for an average of 878.3 Google Scholar citations per faculty.  When the administrators are included, the total rises to 21,571 Google Scholar citations while the average falls to 798.9 Google Scholar citations per faculty.  When the data are broken down by departmental unit, the 10 members of the corps of instruction in accounting and finance are responsible for 7,786 Google Scholar citations, for an average of 778.6 G...

The 2025 Scopus CiteScores from Elsevier have been released and Turner Business will be reporting on some of the implications of the new information on the impact of academic journals. This post begins by reporting that two journals housed in the Turner College, Compensation and Benefits Review and the Journal of Financial Economic Policy , have each risen in terms of impact. The former of these, edited by Turner College management professor Phil Bryant and published by SAGE, reports a 2025 Scopus CiteScore of 2.2, up from its 2024 score of 1.7. Bryant's journal recently entered the Australian Business Deans Council ratings for the first time, coming in as a C-rated journal. The journal now boasts an SJR score of 0.399 from Scimago, placing it on the fence between a C- and B-rated journal by that organization. The latter of these journals, edited by Turner College economics professor Frank Mixon and published by Wiley, reports a 2025 Scopus CiteScore of 4.1, up from its 2024 s...

As reported by Jim Milliot for Publisher's Weekly , in a major deal in the academic journals sector, Wiley has acquired U.K.-based Emerald Publishing from Cambridge Information Group for £337 million ($452 million at current exchange rates), expanding Wiley’s journal portfolio to approximately 2,500 titles and increasing its position in the social sciences — particularly economics, business, and finance. As Milliot explains,  in announcing the purchase Wiley observed that in addition to expanding its journal offerings, the acquisition better positions Wiley in the AI and data analytics space at a moment when demand for trusted peer-reviewed research content is accelerating rapidly as companies scale up AI models and applications. To date, Wiley has signed AI licensing agreements worth more than $100 million. According to Milliot, by the end of this year Wiley expects Emerald to generate more than $85 million of revenue with mid-single-digit revenue growth, 92% recurring subscr...

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...

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...

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...

Possibly for the first time ever, two winners were announced to receive one of the Turner College's faculty awards as both  Turner College associate professor of accounting   Jasmine Bordere and TSYS School computer science professor  Yi Zhou took home the 2026 Turner College Excellence in Research Award.  Like most researchers, Bordere's scholarship includes peer-reviewed journal articles, interdisciplinary research collaborations, and applied research that informs both academic literature and professional practice. Her eclectic research program addresses financial reporting standards, auditing practices, teaching effectiveness and student learning in higher education. Bordere's first publication, a study of audit risk, appears in the 2015 volume of Current Issues in Auditing . In the above and other areas, Bordere has experienced several research successes in recent years. Her 2020 article in Internal Auditing examines the financial reporting impacts of the coro...