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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Research by the University of South Alabama's Ermanno Affuso,  Ján Buleca and Maryna Tatar of the Technical University of Košice,  and Turner College economist Frank Mixon on the impact of armed conflicts on the price of energy in the European Union has recently been included in reports by BBC News on U.S. conflicts with Venezuela and, more recently, Iran. These researchers utilize a  worldwide annual count of armed conflicts to capture the global conflict environment that can affect European household energy prices through commodity markets, sanctions, shipping disruptions, insurance premiums and geopolitical uncertainty.  The central story of the research is that higher global conflict exposure since the late 1990s is associated with an adverse shift in energy supply and losses in consumer welfare that have grown to 30 billion Euros. Affuso, one of the study's co-authors, has also discussed the work with the Mobile, Alabama, FOX affiliate on multiple occasions as t...

The newest list of Top 50 journals in business has been released by The Financial Times . This list is used by many of the top business schools around the globe to evaluate business faculty. Containing only 50 journals, this list is generally too restrictive to use as an assessment tool at most business schools. The typical business school employs longer lists constructed by the Chartered Association of Business Schools, the Australian Business Deans Council and Scimago. The new FT Top 50 list is provided below. Congrats to Turner College faculty who have published from this list in the past, such as Charles Boster (accounting), Deborah Kidder (management), Laurence Marsh (management), Frank Mixon (economics) and Ed O'Donnell (marketing). Academy of Management Annals Academy of Management Journal Academy of Management Review Accounting Review Accounting, Organizations and Society Administrative Science Quarterly American Economic Review American Sociological Review Contemporar...

A new study on the history of business education in the U.S. by the Turner College's Kirk Heriot and Neal Thomson , along with Kennesaw State University's Shelby Meek, opens by pointing out that t he introductory business curriculum in the United States has remained largely unchanged since  the 1920s, despite dramatic shifts in higher education, business practice, and student needs. As the authors assert, the persistence of historical practice increasingly undermines student  success, institutional sustainability, and the relevance of business education. The researchers explain that m ost students encounter business education for the first time through accounting and economics,  which are the two courses with the highest national failure and withdrawal rates.  High failure rates are  also well documented in business statistics, another early-stage gatekeeper, where structural,  instructional, and system-level factors all contribute to widespread student di...

New research by Turner College economist Frank Mixon and his colleague Ricardo Faria of Florida Atlantic University addresses fragmentation  of academic research on entrepreneurship that is borne out of an underrepresentation of some key figures in the history of economic thought. As these authors point out, much of the academic research on entrepreneurship relies heavily, as it should, on the work by  late economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), particularly his 1934 and 1942 books respectively titled T he Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest , and the Business Cycle and Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy . However, Schumpeter's important work on entrepreneurship was preceded by that of  the late Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), which is best represented by his 1920 and 1922 books respectively titled Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis and Economic Calculation in the Socialist Common...

Prior research has found servant leadership to be positively associated with beneficial outcomes, including employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and employee commitment. Servant leadership theory suggests that these outcomes should translate into better financial performance. However, little research has examined the relationship between servant leadership and firm financial performance. To address this issue, Turner College finance professor Brett Cotten , Douglas Schneider, the Edwin Jones Endowed Professor of Accounting at East Carolina University, and Danielle Navarrete , an adjunct professor of business in the Turner College, examine, in a study appearing in the current issue of Servant Leadership: Theory & Practice , a number of profitability and efficiency ratios of servant leadership firms, comparing them to those of their non-servant leadership peers.  To identify Servant Leadership firms, the researchers began with the ‘Servant Leadership  Companies List’ ...

Contemporary news coverage of the property damage and human cost associated with the California wildfires of 2024 and early 2025 provided some of the most heart-wrenching images of a natural disaster in U.S. history. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, more than 8,000 individual fires had, by the end of 2024, burned almost 1.1 million acres of California property and destroyed more than 1,700 structures.  The combination of drought conditions, thick underbrush and Santa Ana winds worked to extend the fires into January of 2025, particularly around Los Angeles and San Diego. Prominent among these fires was the Pacific Palisades fires, which began in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles County on 7 January 2025 and would eventually devastate large swaths of Pacific Palisades, Topanga and Malibu before ultimate containment of them on the last day of the month.  More than 30 lives were lost as a result of the fires and estimates of the prop...