As a sociologist, Angela Garcia routinely fits together how and why people do things. What unfolds when someone calls 911? Takes part in a divorce mediation session? Visits an Internet chat room? Lately she has fixed on a real conundrum: process and motivation in the construction of jigsaw puzzles.
With the business model of the credit rating agencies in the news again, we wonder if there will be more than partial repairs.
Since U.S. Attorney Eric Holder filed suit against the market leader, Standard & Poor’s, seeking $5 billion in damages, we are about to find out.
Globalization. It’s the buzzword of a generation, but what does the term really mean? Ask a Chinese economist, a South African cinematographer, an American cultural anthropologist, and a Mexican migrant worker, and each is likely to give a different definition.
The service sector used to be the stepchild of the business world, with a reputation for relatively low-paying positions in industries such as retail, banking and hospitality. No more. Service is drawing the attention of high-powered executives and academics alike.
What will be the tipping point for national legal recognition of gay marriage? Politicians, scholars, activists, and historians can all disagree but one thing is certain: the Supreme Court cannot avoid at least the first significant step toward that tipping point this month.
Anyone experiencing the current political climate might easily conclude that our system of governing is either severely dysfunctional, even broken.
Scam artists — the only criminals we refer to as artists — are quite clever at taking advantage of whatever is capturing public interest. Obamacare is no exception, particularly as data is collected during the October 1 launch of the initial open enrollment period.
This has been an eventful summer for all of us who care about the world. In June, we marked the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In July, we recorded the hottest-ever month in the United States. In August and September, we listened to the two presidential candidates as they squared off on climate change in their respective convention speeches. And later in September, we learned that the drastic melting of the Arctic sea ice had set a new record, with ice covering just 24 percent of the surface of the Arctic Ocean.
During the financial crisis of 2007-2009, the banking industry suffered a huge decline in liquidity on their own balance sheets, decreasing the amount of money they could lend. Did banks’ efforts to absorb the liquidity shock spike a decline in overall credit supply?
Banks were hit hard during the 2007-2009 financial crisis: in a short span, interbank lending markets froze, markets for asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities collapsed, and borrowers utilized previously approved loan commitments.
Some cultural critics slam the mixing of art and economics, insisting that commerce cheapens creativity. For Ben Aslinger, that intersection is where things start to get interesting.
“Everything is economic in the long run,” says the assistant professor in Bentley’s English and Media Studies Department. “Our system of commodity exchange and payment actually creates the conditions for creativity.”