Westfair Communications – University of Connecticut management professor Timothy B. Folta has been elected to a five-year term overseeing the Business Policy and Strategy (BPS) Division of the Academy of Management. The academy is an organization of management educators, with more than 19,000 members in 120 countries. In addition to hosting conferences and supporting research, it publishes six research journals. The BPS division has more than 5,000 members.
Faculty
Precarious Work: The Need for Flextime Employment Rights and Proposals for Reform
Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, Vol. 37, Issue 1 (2016)
Millions of Americans are under intense pressure to balance work and family responsibilities. The feeling of overwork is rampant, with nearly half of employees feeling overworked or overwhelmed by their workplace responsibilities. This Article argues for a suite of legal protections that would allow working families, especially single-parent and low-income families, basic access to the rights and protections of flexible work. These protections include amending FLSA rides to better protect non-exempt workers from intrusions into their non-working time, as well as expanding the use of the FMLA to encourage more use of flexible leave. This article also recommends adoption of right-to-request legislation, enabling employees to request a flexible schedule and have that request meaningfully evaluated by their employer without fear of retaliation. Full article.
Turning Corporate Compliance into Competitive Advantage
University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, Vol. 19, No.2 (2017)
Compliance is a core concern for corporate governance. Firms devote tremendous amounts of money, personnel, and attention to ensure compliance with regulatory mandates — and yet compliance failures proliferate. This is because the current static and binary view of compliance hinders both efficient compliance by firms and effective regulation by government. Understanding the reality that compliance is both dynamic and driven by efficiency empowers firms to evolve past mere conformance and into wealth maximizing innovation. This Article develops an efficient investment-risk (EIR) model of compliance that captures the tradeoffs between cost and risk, parses the oft-commingled concepts of technical efficiency and allocative efficiency, and enables firms to obtain a competitive advantage through compliance. We also turn our attention to regulators, and highlight how the EIR model can enhance regulatory design, foster regulator-firm cooperation, and advance the mutual goals of business and society. Full article.
There’s One Major Thing Everyone Gets Wrong About Amazon and the Retail Apocalypse
Business Insider – Amazon and the rise of online shopping have been repeatedly blamed for the staggering rate of store closures and bankruptcies disrupting the retail industry in the US.
But e-commerce accounts for only a small fraction of the problems pushing many American retailers to the brink of death, according to Doug Stephens, a retail-industry consultant.
5 Strategies of ‘Psychological Pricing’
True Viral News – We are all in business to solve problems, add value and make a profit — tasks which involve pricing your product or service. But how do you effectively price your product or service to increase sales and make more money with little or no effort?
CT at Center of Corporate Relocation Strategy
Hartford Business Journal – Health insurer Aetna’s decision to relocate top-level employees to New York City, while maintaining the bulk of its workforce in Hartford, is part of a nationwide management trend in which companies are increasingly separating their corporate executives from the rest of their workforce.
What Do Measures of Real-Time Corporate Sales Tell Us About Earnings Surprises and Post-Announcement Returns?
Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation – Namho Kang is Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Connecticut. This post is based on a recent paper authored by Professor Kang; Kenneth A. Froot, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; Gideon Ozik, Affiliate Professor of Finance at EDHEC Business School; and Ronnie Sadka, Professor of Finance at Boston College Carroll School of Management.
Are Noisy Airport Flight Paths Discriminatory?
As Fed Reserve Scholar, Professor Cohen Explores Airport Noise, Housing Vacancy Ripple Effects
Jeffrey Cohen, a professor of finance and real estate, served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis for four days in May. Continue Reading
UConn Professor Gets Some Answers About Social Media Addiction
Mansfield Patch – A University of Connecticut faculty member has reached a conclusion about social media addiction — the answer seems to lie not with quantity of postings but whether people post more on weekends than weekdays.
UConn operations and information management professor Xue Bai and two colleagues revealed the findings in a newly published study in the journal “Information & Management” titled, “Weekdays or weekends: Exploring the impacts of microblog posting patterns on gratification and addiction.”
Social Media Addiction: Who’s Most at Risk?
HealthNewsDigest.com – Are you at risk of becoming addicted to social media?
It seems the answer lies not in how much you tweet or microblog, but rather, whether you post significantly more on weekends than weekdays.
That’s what UConn operations and information management professor Xue Bai and two colleagues found in a newly published study in the journal Information & Management titled, “Weekdays or weekends: Exploring the impacts of microblog posting patterns on gratification and addiction.” Their findings are based on in-depth study of the habits and responses of a diverse group of 308 microbloggers.