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This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedag...

This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedag...

This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedag...

Parental Education Matters for Adolescent Health: The Importance of Parental Education in the US

Human trafficking is a global problem. In this paper, I seek to find the determinants of international human trafficking by using the US as a case study. Previous studies have drawn primarily from the migration literature, proposing hypotheses that focus on economic factors, the level of democracy and other “push” factors in the countries of origin that create incentives for individuals to migrate. However, we know that international human trafficking is an involuntary form of migration and may be influenced by additional factors. I hypothesize that factors that influence the cost–benefit calculation of the trafficker determine the volume of human trafficking, in addition to the factors that affect the size of the pool of trafficking victims. I test my theory using the negative binomial regression model. My results indicate that while income inequality within a country and poor protection of women's rights are likely to produce a specific pool of victims, it is the reduction of operational costs for the trafficker that increases the number of individuals who are trafficked.

This paper analyzes the effect of TV advertising and in-store displays on the sales of chocolates. I examine which method is more effective in gaining customers and in increasing total sales. Also, I look at the evidence to see whether the lack of advertising by a firm will hurt the industry as a whole. In this paper, I use a nested logit model on scanner data obtained by the Zwick Center for Food and Resource Policy at the University of Connecticut to examine the effect of TV advertising on chocolate sales. The results show that in-store displays and advertising both help increase the demand for chocolate.

Purpose: This study examined the history, growth and structure of two of the world's largest confectionery makers, Hershey and Mars, to determine why these two companies chose their current organizational form. Design/method/approach: This paper starts off with an analysis of the industrial foundation which is a common organizational form in Europe but rarely found in the United States. A historical analysis is then made of both Hershey and Mars using literature from economics, law, history and management to come up with answers as to why the two corporations are organized the way they are today. Findings: The study found that Hershey adopted the industrial-foundation organizational form based on the donor-agency theory which assures donors that their donations are not redistributed as profits to residual claimants. The non-distribution constraint in the Hershey Trust Company prevents dividends (donations) from being redistributed to residual claimants, and that the non-distribution constraint makes more sense for Hershey because its founder, Milton Hershey, expressed his preference to leave a long lasting legacy. The study also found that Mars has chosen a family-controlled organizational form based on the competitive advantage theory which postulates that firm value is maximized when families retain control, benefitting both family and nonfamily shareholders. Originality/value: There have been few studies on the history and organizational evolution of the American confectionery industry. The study is unique as it addresses some gaps in the literature as it provides a historical and institutional study into that particular industry.

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Purpose The purpose of this is paper is to pay a closer look at the 2008-2009 financial crisis (and its aftermath) and analyzes stock returns of nine major US oil companies as well as the oil and gas sector under daily data from January 1992 to April 2012. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopt the arbitrage pricing theory model to examine the relationship between stock returns and their influences including oil price return, yield spreads, and US dollar index return. The authors also provide a test for structural changes in each regression model of return series to capture for multiple breaks. To examine the asymmetric effect of oil price returns on stock returns, the authors separate oil price returns series into two series: positive changes in oil price and negative changes in oil price. Findings The authors find stock returns of oil companies as well as the oil and gas sector are positively affected by oil prices and have stronger effects in the downward direction. Interestingly, The authors find the effects of oil price movements on stock returns increase over time. The authors examine the possibility that investors wishing to hedge against a weakening USD invest in US oil companies and find that more than half of these companies benefit from a weaker USD against the JPY, while all strongly benefit from a weaker USD against major currencies. Originality/value The authors employ daily data for two-decade period including the last global financial crisis. Due to the long-term period covered in this study, sequential Bai-Perron tests are used to detect structural breaks of stock return series. In addition, the data-dependent procedures result in good specifications throughout with white-noise processes in almost all cases.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify three (maturity, agency, and information) effects that help explain the change in idiosyncratic volatility after a firm initiates a dividend. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a cross-sectional analysis where the standard errors are adjusted for heteroskedasticity. As for robustness check, the authors perform two-stage analysis to control for potential self-selection bias. The authors also control for 2003 Dividend Tax Cut effect, matching-firm volatility, and confounding events. Findings Using a sample of 688 dividend-initiating firms for a period of 1977 to 2010, the authors find evidence consistent with the hypotheses based on the maturity, agency, and information effects. The volatility changes upon the dividend initiation can be reliably explained by the changes in profit volatility and free cash flow per total assets, and whether the firm consummated a stock split prior to the dividend initiation. The information effect is also found to be economically significant. Originality/value By studying a firm’s decision to initiate a dividend and its impact on the change in its volatility, the research helps contribute to the payout policy and volatility literatures.

Using weekly data from January 3, 2003 to March 27, 2015, we examine the responses of U.S. stock returns (S&P 500, DJIA, and NASDAQ) to monetary policy, controlling for WTI oil prices and the value of the U.S. dollar (USD) against major currencies. Based on differences between the federal funds rate and inflation expectations, U.S. real interest rates have become continuously negative since January 28, 2009. Vector auto-regressions (VARs) suggest stronger linkages more recently and vine copula models identify the structure of dependence across these markets, which can help investors optimize portfolio diversification.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 ensured millions of American students had a legal right to free and appropriate physical education. Yet, there is confusion about who delivers appropriate adapted physical education (APE). This article reflects on the half century of legally defined APE and a country’s response to preparing teachers for the disability-related demands of the job. A critical perspective is offered with the hope of improving physical educational outcomes for students with disabilities.

College student mental health has been a critical concern for professional counselors. Anxiety and depressive disorders have become increasingly prevalent over the past decade. Utilizing machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), we developed predictive models (i.e., eXtreme Gradient Boosting [XGBoost], Random Forest, Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression) to identify US college students at heightened risk of diagnosable anxiety and depressive disorders. The dataset included 61,619 students from 133 US higher education institutions and was partitioned into a 90:10 ratio for training and testing the models. We employed hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation to optimize model performance and examined multiple measures of predictive performance (e.g., area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC], accuracy, sensitivity). Results revealed strong discriminative power in our machine learning predictive models with AUC of 0.74 and 0.77, indicating current financial situation, sense of belonging on campus, disability status, and age as the top predictors of anxiety and depressive disorders. This study provides a practical tool for professional counselors to proactively identify students for anxiety and depressive disorders before these conditions escalate. Application of machine learning in counseling research provides data-driven insights that help enhance the understanding of mental health determinants, guide prevention and intervention strategies, and promote the well-being of diverse student populations through counseling.

Wallace Huffman continued the tradition of research on Midwest rural labor markets at Iowa State University that was begun in the 1930s by his advisers T.W. Schultz and D. Gale Johnson. We review the lessons learned from this research about the wisdom of policies aimed at retaining population in rural areas in the face of market forces and technological changes that create incentives to migrate to urban areas. Professor Huffman's teaching and lessons learned from the Iowa State Human Resources Workshop continues to shape recent research on the roles of agglomeration economies, information technologies, and returns to human capital on the strength of rural labor markets and policies regarding rural economic development.

The often observed empirical divergence between WTA and WTP measures of welfare change continues to be a topic of interest to both theoretical and applied economists. The divergence has particularly important implications for environmental policy. In this article, we review behavioral and other explanations of the disparity, with a focus on their connections to neoclassical welfare theory, and evaluate the empirical evidence of these explanations through the same lens. Some explanations of the disparity are consistent with neoclassical models, and some are not. Likewise, some imply that the divergences are attributed to underlying preferences (neoclassical or not), whereas others suggest that the divergences are due to elicitation methods, cognitive limitations, or other non-preference-related reasons. We argue that the source of the divergence can inform the choice of which measure, WTP or WTA, to use in a given empirical application.

We test whether commonly used measures of agglomeration economies encourage new firm entry in both urban and rural markets. Using new firm location decisions in Iowa and North Carolina, we find that measured agglomeration economies increase the probability of new firm entry in both urban and rural areas. Firms are more likely to locate in markets with an existing cluster of firms in the same industry, with greater concentrations of upstream suppliers or downstream customers, and with a larger proportion of college-educated workers in the local labor supply. Firms are less likely to enter markets with no incumbent firms in the sector or where production is concentrated in relatively few sectors. The same factors encourage both stand-alone start-ups and establishments built by multiplant firms. Commuting decisions exhibit the same pattern as new firm entry with workers commuting from low to high agglomeration markets. Because agglomeration economies are important for rural firm entry also, policies encouraging new firm entry should focus on relatively few job centers rather than encouraging new firm entry in every small town.

Existing studies provide mixed evidence that the U.S. macroeconomic news impacts international stock prices. We believe this may be related to the fact that economic surprises may not capture how investors interpret macroeconomic releases in various economic conditions. Consequently, we follow Birz and Lott (2011) and use newspaper coverage of economic releases as a measure of news. We argue that in addition to capturing the surprise component of macroeconomic releases, newspaper coverage provide interpretation of these releases similarly to how investors may interpret them in various economic conditions. Out of 15 examined international stock markets, we find that the U.S. macroeconomic news impacts stock returns of 12 countries.