Curriculum assessment through a capstone course: a case study in hospitality and tourism programs

The purpose of this study was to develop a systematic process that other educational institutions and programs could follow to establish a consistent and accurate evaluation method for a capstone course. Hospitality industry professionals and hospitality management faculty were interviewed through focus-group discussions, and a post-focus-group survey was conducted to determine a weighted percentage for each of the nine determined content domains. A test blueprint for a hospitality management capstone course was developed to measure programmatic student learning outcomes based on the weighted domains determined through this study. The results provide a usable instrument for hospitality and tourism management programs to enhance their current assessment methodology.     

Looking into the black box of boosting: the case of Germany

This article looks into the ‘fine print’ of boosting for economic forecasting. By using German industrial production for the period from 1996 to 2014 and a data set consisting of 175 monthly indicators, we evaluate which indicators get selected by the boosting algorithm over time and four different forecasting horizons. It turns out that a number of hard indicators like turnovers, as well as a small number of survey results, get selected frequently by the algorithm and are therefore important to forecasting the performance of the German economy. However, there are indicators such as money supply that never get chosen by the boosting approach at all.     

The interdisciplinarity of evolutionary approaches to human behavior: A key to survival in the Ivory Archipelago

This paper explores the degree of interdisciplinarity of evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior, and the implications that any such interdisciplinarity may have for the future of evolutionary psychology (EP) as a field of scholarship. To gauge the extent of interdisciplinarity of EP, the departmental affiliation of first-authors from 1000 journal articles evenly distributed across ten leading peer-reviewed psychology journals was assessed. Findings show that journals that are evolutionary-based have more first-authors from outside of psychology, and also include a wider variety of represented disciplines. These findings are discussed in terms of their influence on the future of EP, as a model for interdisciplinary research. EP's future will be successful if it continues to promote interdisciplinarity as well as recognize the epistemological worth of multiple evolutionary paradigms and frameworks. Evolutionary principles have been successfully applied to a broad range of topics, suggesting there is great utility in evolution serving as a common language for interdisciplinary pursuits within the behavioral and social sciences. As such, academic programs such as Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) programs, whose presence continues to increase across academic institutions worldwide, epitomize the future of successful interdisciplinary scholarly training.     

Venture capital funds and the public equity market

This paper considers the relationship between the public equity market and the returns to venture investing using a dataset which is derived from the records of two large limited partners who have been investing in venture capital for almost 30 years. Evidence is found to suggest that market conditions over the investment cycle, and exit conditions at the time of exit in particular, are an important determinant. This paper also investigates whether any other aspects of the venture investment process respond to events in the broader market. While general trends are evident in the venture investment cycle, only the intensity of the investment process is found to respond to events in the public equity market.     

HEGY Tests in the Presence of Moving Averages*

We analyze the asymptotic distributions associated with the seasonal unit root tests of Hylleberg et al. (1990) for quarterly data when the innovations follow a moving average process. Although both the t‐ and F‐type tests suffer from scale and shift effects compared with the presumed null distributions when a fixed order of autoregressive augmentation is applied, these effects disappear when the order of augmentation is sufficiently large. However, as found by Burridge and Taylor (2001) for the autoregressive case, individual t‐ratio tests at the semi‐annual frequency are not pivotal even with high orders of augmentation, although the corresponding joint F‐type statistic is pivotal. Monte Carlo simulations verify the importance of the order of augmentation for finite samples generated by seasonally integrated moving average processes.     

Workers’ Participation in Training and Import Competition: Evidence from the USA

Merging industry‐level data on imports into the NLSY79 cohort data, we examine the relationship between rising imports and the amount of time workers in the US manufacturing sector spend in training events. A simple theoretical model shows the effect of foreign competition may depend on the type of training. Controlling for both industry and individual fixed effects, we find that rising imports lead workers to spend less time in training for the purpose of career advancement. There is some evidence this effect is stronger for less educated and lower ability workers.     

Notes from a life influenced by Wendell Bell

Wendell Bell's idealistic vision of the role of the sociologist in creating a brighter future for society and his theoretical framework of the role of intellectual elites in the decisions of nationhood are examined through the personal lens of a former Caribbean student of the West Indies Study Program at UCLA.     

Generalized Disappointment Aversion and Asset Prices

We characterize generalized disappointment aversion (GDA) risk preferences that can overweight lower‐tail outcomes relative to expected utility. We show in an endowment economy that recursive utility with GDA risk preferences generates effective risk aversion that is countercyclical. This feature comes from endogenous variation in the probability of disappointment in the representative agent's intertemporal consumption‐saving problem that underlies the asset pricing model. The variation in effective risk aversion produces a large equity premium and a risk‐free rate that is procyclical and has low volatility in an economy with a simple autoregressive endowment‐growth process.