Examining Trends in the Nonresidential Building Construction Producer Price Indexes (PPIs)

In 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unveiled the Producer Price Index (PPI) nonresidential building construction initiative with the publication of an index for new warehouse building construction. PPI has since added nonresidential building construction indexes for schools, offices, industrial buildings, and health care buildings. This construction sector initiative is noteworthy as it expanded coverage into an important sector of the U.S. economy not previously measured by the PPI, and allowed the examination of different drivers of building construction inflation. According to Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data, in the first quarter of 2005, the value of private fixed investment in structures totaled $1.137 trillion, representing about 8.9 percent of total gross domestic product (GDP). Of private fixed investment in structures, nonresidential structures alone represented$330.8 billion, or about 2.6 percent of total GDP. By the fourth quarter of 2013, nonresidential structures investments grew to $473.4 billion, or 2.8 percent of total GDP

The Pontificate of John Paul II: A Pastoral Model for Effective Leadership

Throughout the course of human history, there have been individuals whose lives have transformatively impacted entire generations In the Catholic Church. One such person was Pope John Paul II. This paper attempts to designate him as an effective leader by analyzing his personal life, pastoral engagements, and relationships with others through the lens of value-based, authentic, and positive leadership. The resources for this analysis were based on documents and archival materials. Upon analyzing the data, it was concluded that John Paul II’s pontificate was an era of effective leadership. From this conclusion, the implications for contemporary leaders at different levels and contexts were examined. The recommendation for possible research on the subject focuses on ways of modeling pastoral leadership in the Church after the late pope’s works, edicts, and everyday actions

Managing Growth: Best Practices of Family-Owned Businesses

Family-owned businesses represent the majority of business in the United States. As consumers and employees, we are compelled to their sense of trustworthiness that all too often disappears in the business world. Our economy depends on the success of family-owned businesses, but only one third of these organizations successfully transition to the second generation and only one in ten survive to the third generation. While a series of best practices attempt to prescribe solutions their challenges, these practices fail to account for the various types of family-owned businesses. More specifically, many types of family-owned businesses exist as evident by specific transitions in terms of ownership, family and business. Therefore, the study of best practices in family firms must consider the timing of implementation. This study analyzes three family-owned businesses that successfully transitioned from start-up businesses owned by a single controlling owner ready to give up control to an expanding business owned by a sibling partnership with young children. From this analysis of a specific type of family-owned business, six common practices emerged

Intellectual Humility

We critique two popular philosophical definitions of intellectual humility: the “low concern for status” and the “limitations-owning.” accounts. Based upon our analysis, we offer an alternative working definition of intellectual humility: the virtue of accurately tracking what one could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of one’s own beliefs. We regard this view of intellectual humility both as a virtuous mean between intellectual arrogance and diffidence and as having advantages over other recent conceptions of intellectual humility. After defending this view, we sketch remaining questions and issues that may bear upon the psychological treatment of intellectual humility such as whether evidence will help determine how this construct relates to general social humility on the one hand, and intellectual traits such as open-mindedness, curiosity, and honesty on the other