College of Business & Public Affairs :::::::: journal of business and public affairs

	Table of Content

	Potentially Violent Employees: Minimizing Risk in the Workplace
	Dinah Payne, Augusta C. Yrle and Michael D. Malone An unfortunate “fact” of 21st Century American life is the widespread appearance of violence and incivility throughout society and in the workplace. In this paper, we suggest that violence in the workplace is a phenomenon with which managers, as agents of their employing organizations, will be confronted throughout the foreseeable future. We summarize what is known about workplace violence: what constitutes violence and potential violence, what are the characteristics of potential perpetrators, what kinds of behaviors serve as identifiers, how to deal with the targets of violence, and how to deal with the potentially violent individuals themselves. Our attention has been directed to the practicing manager, and we have used what is known about workplace violence and those who are potential aggressors to develop ideas for the manager to use proactively in preventing workplace violence where possible and in combating it when it occurs.
	A Delphi Study to Identify Critical Success Factors 17 for Launching a High-Volume, High Traffic Web Site
	Denise Williams Although the literature addresses E-commerce success, it does not examine the successfulness of launching of web sites. The goal of this study is to identify critical success factors for launching high-volume, high-traffic web sites. A four-round Webbased Delphi study was conducted to address this question. ...
	Returns to Higher Education: United States Gender Evidence
	Scott L. Tori and Cynthia Royal Tori This paper examines the relationship between educational attainment using four levels of degrees and gender median income per capita. The analysis expands the literature by including two year degree when examining educational attainment, and by estimating the returns to educational attainment by gender while controlling for demographic-specific variables by gender. The results find that in general a higher level of education increases median income per capita. However the results show that no degree provides a positive and significant return across all regions and across all genders. The results suggest that relying solely on national data to estimate the returns to educational attainment will not reveal the significant differences of returns to degree across regions and across genders.
	An Empirical Note on the Laffer Curve
	David R. Kamerschen An important policy question is what influence the U.S. highest marginal tax rate (HMTR) has on U.S. real individual income taxes receipts (adjusted for inflation) collected by the government ala the Laffer curve. The Laffer curve shows that while increases in the HMTR may increase tax receipts, eventually they decrease tax receipts because the HMTR discourages production and hence GDP and the income of taxpayers. The Laffer curve acts like own-price elasticity of demand. If the government raises prices (i.e., the tax rate) when demand is inelastic, total revenues (i.e., total tax receipts) increase. However, if the government raises prices (i.e., tax rates) when demand is elastic, total revenues (i.e., total tax receipts) fall. So when the economy is in the elastic segment of the demand or Laffer curve and the government wants to raise tax receipts, it needs to cut the tax rate. The Laffer curve theory was the primary justification of tax cuts in the Tax Reform Act of 1981 in the U.S. ...
	An Empirical Investigation of the Effectiveness of Erp Systems, as Assessed by Management Accountants
	K. W. Vanvuren, W. Mark Wilder and Rick Elam This study examines the benefits and weaknesses of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as experienced by organizations. A survey addressing the perceived benefits and weaknesses of their organization’s management information system was sent to a random group of 5,000 members of the Institute of Management Accountants. Respondents were asked to complete the survey as either an ERP-User or a NON-ERP-User. A series of MANOVA/ANOVA procedures were conducted, including both between-subjects and within-subjects comparisons. The results of this study indicate that ERP-Users perceive that their systems provide: 1) greater reconciliation of conflicting goals, 2) greater standardization of processes, 3) increased lowering of product costs, 4) quicker decision-making, and 5) better decision-making than do NON-ERP-Users. However, ERP-Users also perceive more complexity in their systems than do NON-ERP-Users, and ERP-Users think that their systems took too long to implement.
	Interpreting Business Sentiment Surveys: A Factor Analysis Approach
	Dan Friesner, Mohammed Khayum and Matthew Q. McPherson This paper explores the information contained in a business sentiment survey conducted for a medium-sized, regional, Midwestern economy. We apply factor analysis techniques to the data in an effort to determine how firm expectations about local economic performance, firm performance, selling prices, labor, and capital are related to the formation of business sentiment. We find that expectations about overall firm performance, planned capital expenditures, and hiring plans proxy for a single, latent process while expectations about average selling prices and local economic performance represent a second latent phenomenon.