Unhappiness after Hurricane Katrina

In August, September and October of 2005, the Monthly Surveys of Consumers fielded by the University of Michigan included questions about the happiness of a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. The date of each interview is known. Looking at the data week by week, reported happiness dipped significantly in the first week of September, after the seriousness of the damage done by Katrina became clear. The impulse response of happiness is especially strong in the South Central region, closest to the devastation of Katrina. The dip in happiness lasted two or three weeks in the South Central region; in the rest of the country, reported happiness returned to normal after one or two weeks. In addition to the reaction to Katrina, happiness dipped significantly after the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. These results illustrate the potential of high-frequency happiness data to yield information about preferences over regional, national and international conditions by indicating the magnitude of the good or bad news conveyed by events.

Antecedents and performance consequences of international outsourcing

The outsourcing of intermediate products to international suppliers is believed to improve firm performance. We investigate this claim and test key dimensions of the decision to outsource internationally using survey data on 200 manufacturing firms located in the Netherlands. We find that most international outsourcing is intra-regional in nature. Furthermore international outsourcing is a consequence of a firm‟s ability to search and evaluate foreign suppliers, which is co-determined by its size, multinationality, and frequency of cross-border communications. Finally, no performance effects were observed for international or global outsourcing. We conclude international outsourcing is a balancing act between lower production costs abroad and lower transaction costs locally

OreSat: A Student Team-Based Approach to an Inexpensive, Open, and Modular (1-3U) CubeSat Bus

Most educational CubeSat projects have the same dilemma: not enough money to buy capable COTS hardware, and not enough internal experience (even with teams of students) to build reliable, and inexpensive systems in-house. We present a middle road to the “COTS vs DIY” conundrum: the OreSat bus. OreSat is a fully open source 1U – 3U CubeSat system meant to be built, modified, and flown by student teams. It’s specifically designed to be put together by resource-constrained student teams with “gaps” in their interdisciplinary breadth, as most teams have. OreSat has everything you would expect from a CubeSat system: a 1 – 3U structure, multi-band deployable antenna, solar array, battery pack, on-board computer, radio system, star tracker, reaction wheels, magnetorquers, and SDR GPS receiver. OreSat is built around a high density card-cage system with roughly a 40% higher packing density than the commonly used PC/104-plus stack. Each system is a “card” based on inexpensive 2 and 4 layer PCBs that interface to a common backplane that is capable of carrying CAN, Ethernet, RF, and power. As each CubeSat is unique, the backplane is made bespoke for each mission with 30% of backplane connections available for customization. Student teams can take the existing OreSat systems and build them as is, or modify them for their missions. The OreSat bus is scheduled for first flight in late 2021 (OreSat0, a 1U technology demonstrator), and will be fully deployed in late 2022 as the 2U “OreSat” mission, accepted into the 2017 NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI)

Disease, Normality, and Current Pharmacological Moral Modification

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Currency substitution, portfolio diversification and money demand

We extend the Thomas (1985) dynamic optimising model of money demand and currency substitution to the case in which the individual has restricted or no access to foreign currency denominated bonds. In this case Currency Substitution decisions and Asset Substitution decisions are not separable. The results obtained suggest that the significance of an expected exchange rate depreciation term in the demand for domestic money provides a valid test for the presence of currency substitution. Applying this approach to six Latin American countries, we find evidence of currency substitution in Colombia, Dominican Republic and Venezuela, but not in Brazil and Chile

Embedding knowledge and value of a brand into sustainability for differentiation

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in the Journal of World Business (under the provisional title "Embedding sustainability into brand knowledge and brand value for brand differentiation"). The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.Organisations offer products to consumers, buyers often question if the product or its production process are linked to the environmental, social or economic challenges being faced by mankind. Inquisitiveness of customers in this direction points towards an opportunity for marketers to create differentiation based on the concerns of brand towards overall issue of sustainability. The authors have synthesized knowledge from various domains with a positivistic approach to understand sustainability from the perspective of branding. Using empirical knowledge this study recommends embedding sustainability into brand knowledge and brand value for creating a differentiation for the brand in a competitive market