Author: Scott Slater III

Ask the Experts – Weining Bao

Posted on by Scott Slater III

Wallethub – Why have car insurance premiums been increasing over the past years?

There are multiple reasons for this. Real factors: The cost of repairing vehicles has increased (for example, electric vehicles could be more expensive to repair than traditional gas-powered cars). There has also been an increase in the number of accidents and other risk factors, all of which raise the real cost of providing car insurance.

Nominal factors: Since premiums are quoted in dollars (or in money), inflation also drives up the dollar (or money) amounts needed for coverage, contributing to premium increases.

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Ask the Experts – Kristen Haseney

Posted on by Scott Slater III

Wallethub – Homeownership isn’t for everyone. Roughly 46 million American households have opted to rent rather than buy their homes because of convenience, cost or both. But renting isn’t always a cheaper or better alternative to owning a property. The right road to take depends on a variety of factors, including an individual’s or family’s financial means and how well the local real-estate market is doing.

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The Rule of Law is Key to Capitalism − Eroding it is Bad News for American Business

Posted on by Robert Bird

UConn Today – Something dangerous is happening to the U.S. economy, and it’s not inflation or trade wars. Chaotic deregulation and the selective enforcement of laws have upended markets and investor confidence. At one point, the threat of tariffs and resulting chaos evaporated US$4 trillion in value in the U.S. stock market. This approach isn’t helping the economy, and there are troubling signs it will hurt both the U.S. and the global economy in the short and long term.

The rule of law – the idea that legal rules apply to everyone equally, regardless of wealth or political connections − is essential for a thriving economy. Yet globally the respect for the rule of law is slipping, and the U.S. is slipping with it. According to annual rankings from the World Justice Project, the rule of law has declined in more than half of all countries for seven years in a row. The rule of law in the U.S., the most economically powerful nation in the world, is now weaker than the rule of law in Uruguay, Singapore, Latvia and over 20 other countries.

Originally published in The Conversation.

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A ‘Blueprint for Mass Cybercrime’

Posted on by Stephen Fitzgerald

UConn Today – A sweeping and deeply concerning leak of internet user credentials is making headlines around the globe, with cybersecurity analysts confirming that more than 16 billion usernames and passwords have been compromised in what’s being called the largest credential compilation ever discovered online.

Although many of us have been desensitized to data breaches, this appears to be a much more sophisticated concentration of effort and information.

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UConn 360 Podcast Episode 138: Novel Brands Give Consumers New Choices

Posted on by Scott Slater III

UConn 360 – When somebody scrolls through the top product categories on Amazon odds are some 60% of the brands for sale will be ones you’ve never heard of before. That poses a challenge for marketers looking for their brands to be chosen among the many options, including familiar ones. UConn marketing professor Danielle Brick has researched how novel brands can make inroads in a very crowded marketplace and it has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research. She joins us on the podcast and tells us about how she went about her research, which included offering candy bars to people that just worked out at a gym. Brick also tells us about how novel brands have affected her personal shopping habits and her research on spiteful brand choices in relationships.

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Accounting Professor George Plesko Wins Award for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship

Posted on by Merly Downey

UConn Today – Each year, the Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Community-Engaged Scholarship (PAECES) recognize the outstanding contributions of faculty, staff, students, teams, and community partners who collaboratively address critical societal challenges through the creative and reciprocal exchange of knowledge and resources.

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Their Final Class Project? A Beer-Tasting Showdown

Posted on by Tom Breen

UConn Today – A friendly competition between two teams of UConn student brewers ended with one victor – but with everyone who got a chance to sample both beers a winner.

The UConn Brewing Innovation initiative – a multidisciplinary hub that partners the College of Engineering, School of Business, and College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources – has been showing students how the beer brewing process works from the ground up since 2023, in collaboration with Connecticut breweries.

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Meet the Graduate: MBA Candidate Marc Massicotte

Posted on by Combined Reports

UConn Today – Marc Massicotte says he was nervous about going back to school after 20 years: Would he be able to balance it all, he wondered.

“The students and teachers created an environment that made it easy to acclimate and succeed in the classroom,” he says.

And after plugging away in the School of Business Flex MBA Program, he’s graduating, and planning – perhaps ironically – to continue on in law school.

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Meet the Graduate: Finance major Julianna Cushner

Posted on by Combined Reports

UConn Today – Julianna Cushner comes from a long line of UConn graduates, and during her college search, she thought she might opt for a small, business-centric school. But once she toured the Storrs campus, she knew she wanted to continue the family tradition. Cushner has been involved in a number of activities, many of them centered around finance and investments. She is headed to the banking world of New York City following graduation and knows that the UConn network of alumni will be a benefit to her.

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