Ten CBE faculty members named winners of WWU research awards

Ten Western Washington University faculty members from its College of Business and Economics have received 2012 Dennis R. Murphy Faculty Research Awards, and two CBE faculty members received the David Merrifield Faculty Research Award.

This year’s recipients of the Dennis R. Murphy awards are Earl Benson, Steven Globerman, Steve Henson, Edwin Love, John Krieg, Steve Ross, Mark Springer, Ozan Sula, Craig Tyran, and George Zhang. This year’s recipients of the David Merrifield awards are Pamela LaBorde and Sandra Mottner.

These awards recognize exemplary faculty papers that were accepted for publication by refereed journals between the dates of Aug. 14, 2011 and Aug. 13, 2012.

Earl D. Benson and Barry R. Marks of University of Houston, Clear Lake co-authored the article, “Determinants of Private Sector Insurance Premiums on Municipal Debt Issues,” in the Municipal Finance Journal. This study is the first ever written on the factors that determine Municipal Bond Insurance Premiums.

Steven Globerman’s paper “Investigating Abroad and Investing at Home: Complements or Substitutes?” was published in Multinational Business Review in August. This paper reports the results of 20 case studies designed to assess whether outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and home country capital investment are substitutes or compliments.

John Krieg and Steve Henson of Western Washington University, and Charles Wassel Jr. and David Hendrick of Central Washington University collaborated on the paper “Collective Bargaining and Community College Faculty: What Is the Wage Impact?,” published in the Journal of Labor Research Volume 33, No. 1. This paper addresses multiple data, methodological, and statistical problems that are demonstrated in recent work studying the impacts of unions on full-time faculty salaries in higher education.

Edwin Love authored the article “Divide and Prosper? When Partitioned Prices Make Sense,” accepted and published in January by the Journal of Product and Brand Management. In three studies, Love shows that product bundles offered by low-tier brands are generally more attractive in a partitioned price format, and that bundles offered by high-tier brands are more attractive in a combined price format. Two of these studies were conducted using student subjects, while the third was based on data collected from eBay. This investigation also provides a better understanding of how consumers evaluate bundles.

Mark Springer, Craig Tyran, and Steve Ross collaborated on the study “Assessing the Quality of a Decision Support E-Service,” accepted May 7, 2012 by the International Journal of E-Business Research. This article proposes and validates a quality assessment instrument for a type of e-service that has not yet been studied: a Web-based decision support system. Based on a study involving more than 600 subjects, the authors identified those quality dimensions that affect customer loyalty for a pure e-service of this type.

Ozan Sula authored the article “Demand for International Reserves in Developing Nations: A Quantile Regression Approach,” which was published in the Journal of International Money and Finance in September 2011. In his article, Sula estimates the determinants of the demand for international reserves using quantile regressions. His findings show that the level of reserves is as important as the other determinants of the demand for reserves.

“Optimal maintenance policy for a system subject to damage in a discrete time” co-authored by George Zhang, Yu-Hung Chien of the National Taichung University of Science and Technology and Shey-Huei Sheu of Providence University and National Taiwan University of Science and Technology was published in the journal Reliability Engineering & System Safety. The authors propose a maintenance policy that prescribes a preventative maintenance when the accumulated damage to a system exceeds a pre-specified level, or when the number of operation period reaches a determined time period.

Sandra Mottner and Pamela LaBorde collaborated on the paper, “Can a College Level Personal Finance Course Close the Knowledge Gaps?” The Journal of Financial Education accepted the paper in the 2011-2012 academic year, and publication is forthcoming. In this paper, Mottner and LaBorde demonstrate the need for improving financial literacy in the U.S. population. Previous studies have shown disparity with respect to financial literacy, gender, age/year in school, and ethnicity. This research explores whether a personal financial course at a university can raise overall knowledge base in six areas of financial literacy. Further, it seeks to determine whether a personal finance course can change the disparity in knowledge levels among students by gender, age, and ethnicity.

“The College of Business and Economics is fortunate to have many faculty members who are both excellent teachers and excellent scholars. These awards recognize exemplary work in a wide range of areas which is many times a result of faculty’s collaborative efforts with fellow scholars. The papers and recipients exemplify what we are about as a College. I am proud to work with the recognized authors and everyone in the College,” said Brian Burton, Dean of Western’s College of Business & Economics.

The awards are $1,000 and are funded entirely by supporters of WWU’s College of Business and Economics through the Western Foundation.

“We are very pleased that donors have recognized Dennis Murphy’s legacy to the College and University to fund these very important awards,” said Burton.