For many departments, the procurement of goods and services represents a considerable portion of their budget. These Purchasing Services Policies and Procedures set forth requirements and guidelines to help ensure a proper purchase. It is the responsibility of faculty, staff, and students who need to purchase goods and services on...
E-government and its partner in the electronic age, e-participation, have over the course of the past decade moved from concept to reality, at least at some level, and in the last few years moved from much talked about curiosities to subjects of serious inquiry. The general purpose of this paper...
This paper discusses how to generally elicit probability estimations where the number of outcomes is countable. Theorem 1 states that if we use a strictly convex G, then truth telling is ensured. The paper discusses how to rank forecasters in the order of expertise. When we are comparing distributions with...
The purpose of this paper is to report results of a pilot study which assessed dynamic aspects of learner motivation using self-report instruments in a simulation/gaming-based Arabic learning environment - Tactical Language Training System TLTS. The results indicate that learners with positive attitude and interest in learning a second language...
This paper provides an interactive forum to explore the future of HR's strategic contribution to organizational effectiveness. The paper will introduce a framework for Human Resource Strategic Excellence that is based on a decade of research at the Center for Effective Organizations and illustrate it with best practices from leading...
The authors have studied how limited enforcement of contracts and barriers to business start-up affect the investment in knowledge capital and the adoption of new technologies. Paper shows that barriers to business startup limited competition are the most important obstacle to growth. Limited enforceability of contracts is detrimental to growth...
A new Strategic Plan was adopted for USC. One of the key concepts of the new Strategic Plan is to develop strategic capabilities that provide maximum flexibility for learning and research at USC to evolve as the interfaces between Higher Education, Society, and Government change. This paper explains six (6)...
This paper examines two questions: when do firms make greater use of subjectivity in awarding bonuses, and what are the effects of subjectivity on employee pay satisfaction and firm performance? This paper examines these questions using data from a sample of 526 department managers in 250 car dealerships. First, the...
This study examines the impact of rent control of mobile home parks in seven counties of California between 1983 and 2003. Sales of mobile homes on rent-controlled pads are hypothesized to sell at prices higher than identical models sold in mobile home parks without rent control. The statistical tests corroborated...
Housing policy under the Clinton and Bush Administrations has sought to boost homeownership while also narrowing racial gaps in owner-occupancy rates. Against that backdrop, homeownership rose sharply in the 1990s, but white minority gaps remain in excess of 25 percentage points. This paper analyzes these patterns using data from the...
Electronic transactions regularly occur between business partners in separate security domains. Trust negotiation provides an open authentication and access-control environment for such transactions, but it suffers from malicious attacks leading to denial of service or leakage of sensitive information. In this paper we introduce adaptive trust negotiation and access control...
This paper investigates the effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act SOX on the compensation structure and the risk-taking incentives of CEOs, as revealed by their research and development expenses and capital expenditures. It hypothesizes that firms will respond to the additional liability imposed by SOX on corporate executives by altering the...
The upgrade of the digital wireless infrastructure from narrowband to broadband is a recent phenomenon that has raised new issues as it becomes possible for consumers to access and share downloadable content. Critical issues, fissures and challenges are surfacing in the value chain, as distribution modes for music and other...
Mortgage termination can be caused by one of the competing risks such as refinance, move, or default. The majority of existing empirical papers model the competing risks of mortgage termination using either a logit framework or a proportional hazard framework. This paper proposes a comparative study of competing risks of...
In recent years, much of U.S. federal housing policy has focused on two complimentary goals: to increase U.S. homeownership rates while also narrowing enormous and longstanding racial gaps in homeownership. Against this backdrop, the U.S. homeownership rate rose to historic highs in the 1990s, reaching 67.3 percent in 2001, but...
This paper explicates the intra-metropolitan geography of minority homeownership. In so doing, the analysis applies individual level Census data from the Washington D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles metropolitan areas to estimate three-level nested logit models NMNL of household mobility, homeownership tenure, and residential location choice. The approach is unique to...
Traditional agency theory treats risk as pure measurement error, yielding the standard prediction of risk-incentive tradeoff. This paper proposes a model in which the agent can respond to risk: he can exert effort to collect information about the underlying state in order to make correct decisions. Such effort is thus...
While prior analyses have provided evidence of elevated default probabilities among mortgages originated to lower income, less credit worthy, and minority populations, those risks may be offset by the reduced prepayment probabilities of those loans. This paper employs micro-data from the FHA to estimate an option-based hazard model of the...
This study examines the issue of whether CRA-related events impact the security prices of banking institutions involved in mergers. While previous research has established that bank shareholders experience a significant permanent loss of wealth upon the announcement of a CRA protest, the current research finds no such evidence for either...
Smart Growth advocates in the U.S. and elsewhere worry about urban sprawl and typically advocate new controls on urban growth, including tougher land use planning and regulation. Comparing recent U.S. and Canadian settlement and travel trends suggests a test. Cultural differences are minor but urban policy differences are significant. The...
