Turner Business

Turner Business recently visited with Turner College finance professor Joshua Brooks to discuss his consulting work.  As he explained, some of this work involves acting as a testifying expert, while at other times he acts as a consulting expert.  In both cases, Josh’s experiences serve as examples to his students of the practical applicability of concepts covered in his finance courses.    TB: What types of cases do you provide your professional opinion/work on? JB: I’ve worked on a wide variety of cases as both a testifying expert and as a consulting expert (non-testifying). These cases include investments, econometrics, and derivatives valuation.  Some of my earliest cases as a master’s degree s tudent were on derivatives valuation including credit default swaps and interest rate swaps.  These closely paralleled my work in the master’s program that was focused on derivatives and financial engineering.  Another line of work has been the evalua...

Slava Trofimov ’s educational and professional journey in the information systems space began in 1998, when he enrolled at Columbus State University and selected management information systems as his major.  Upon completion of the Turner College’s BBA program in MIS, Slava accepted the position of Information Technology Product Manager for the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce, just a short drive from the Synovus Center on the CSU’s main campus.  His professional experience in that position sparked an interest in the business side of things, and he made the move to Waco, Texas, to pursue an MBA in the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University.  He completed that program in 2004 and dove into a new position as business analyst for Celebrating Home Direct, an online retailer offering a wide selection of high quality home décor products shipped to customers directly from the manufacturer.  Over the next 12 years with the company, which recently eclipsed $100 m...

What can small and medium size firms (SMFs) do to improve their export performance?   This is the research question posed in a new study by Turner College marketing professor Ed O’Donnell that appears in a recent issue of the International Journal of Business Management and Commerce .  O’Donnell’s study posits that SMFs that adapt the visible peripheral attributes of their products, such as brand name and packaging, to comply to host market norms will experience higher levels of export performance than those that adapt their physical product or that use some other strategy.  To test this theory, he examines data on exporters in the U.S., China and Romania.  The U.S. was used to represent developed markets because it is one of the largest global markets with an income per capita that is comparable to other developed markets.  O’Donnell chose Romania and China because they represent two distinct types of emerging markets with respect to market size and growth rat...

Turner College economist Frank Mixon was recently named Editor of the Journal of Financial Economic Policy (JFEP), with his term set to begin in January of 2023.  The JFEP, which is part of Emerald Publishing’s journal portfolio, publishes r esearch involving financial institutions, financial policy, control issues for firms, central bank policy, risk and uncertainty, and the economics and financial dimensions of market and non-market phenomena.  The JFEP’s editorial board currently includes scholars from Columbia University, University of California – Berkeley, New York University, Georgetown University, University of Florida, Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin, and American University.  The beginning of Mixon’s tenure at the helm of the JFEP will coincide with the journal’s fifteenth year of publication.

 Columbus State University continues to rise in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of U.S. colleges and universities. Among the best regional universities in the U.S. South, CSU ranks 67 th , and among public universities in this category, CSU ranks 30 th . Two of CSU’s individual programs are also included in the magazine’s national rankings for 2022-2023. These are the Turner College at 411 th amount undergraduate business schools in the U.S., and CSU’s School of Nursing, which ranks 413 th among U.S. nursing schools. In the national rankings of business schools, the Turner College is tied with business schools affiliated with Morehead State University and Western Illinois University, among others, while it is ranked ahead of business schools affiliated with Arkansas Tech University and Lamar University, among others.

With high inflation rates currently posing a problem in countries all around the globe, a new study by Turner College economics professor Frank Mixon and his colleague Puneet Vatsa of Lincoln University in New Zealand on business cycles and inflation is almost perfectly timed.   The study, which was recently accepted for publication by the International Journal of Monetary Economics and Finance , updates stylized facts about the cyclical associations between economic output and prices.   In it, Vatsa and Mixon apply the relatively new Hamilton filter, a statistical approach that lends itself well to extracting the cyclical components from non-stationary data series in small samples, to price and output series for 27 countries, including the U.S., from 1999 through 2020.   The study finds mixed evidence regarding the cyclicality of inflation (i.e., the relationship between business cycles and inflation).   For example, Vatsa and Mixon report that inflation is acyclic...

Turner College Center for Economic Education As indicated on the Georgia Council on Economic Education (GCEE) website, a basic understanding of economics and personal finance is essential to making informed decisions as workers, consumers, citizens, savers and investors. It is for this reason that students in Georgia are required to pass an economics course to graduate from high school – yet the majority of teachers who teach economics and personal finance have no formal training in these disciplines.  Each year the GCEE, which is headquartered in downtown Atlanta, delivers more than 100 workshops to thousands of K-12 teachers in an effort to prepare them to teach economics and personal finance creatively and effectively.  For example, in 2021 the GCEE delivered 122 workshops across 141 (of 181) Georgia public school systems.  In all, 4,890 Georgia educators were served by the GCEE in 2021, while 14,692 Georgia educators have been served by the GCEE over the past five yea...