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The landscape of college athletics has changed greatly in the past year. For the first time ever, student athletes can now profit from the use their name, image and likeness. It’s been a hot topic subject for years, and now it’s come to fruition. Dr. David Hunt is an associate professor at Augusta University’s Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and also the faculty athletics representative at AU. “It’s different for Division I and for Division II. For DI, there’s bigger audiences and they have bigger followings. But it isn’t D1, D2 and D3 specific; it just seems like people are willing to put more money into programs at the D1 level,” said Hunt. While some may think NIL deals go to the most popular athletes, that’s not always the case. “There are a lot of NIL opportunities for people who don’t have a huge number of followers, because it tends to hit a particular niche,” added Hunt. It’s not just the notoriety on the court or playing field that can garner an NIL deal, but also a player's social media activity and number of followers. These can be a big tool for student athletes receiving compensation for outside business ventures. “It can be cash or it can be in-kind payments. So for some influencers, companies just send them stuff in an effort to get them wearing it on their social media channels.” Some schools and athletic programs have already negotiated deals for an entire team where all the players can benefit from it, but Hunt said it could lead to legal questions over potential conflict of interest deals. “If a basketball program gets a NIL deal for the whole program with Adidas, can an individual player wear Under Armour? Can an athletic department even do that? It can be helpful and beneficial and monetarily advantageous for those students, but it’s not the students doing that,” said Hunt. All the NIL deals, especially those where schools negotiated them, can be used as a recruiting tool to entice athletes to come play for their program. This could create a recruiting advantage for some states over other states. “One university received NIL deals for every single female athlete. That is a huge advantage compared to other universities. So now some universities can recruit students based on the NIL opportunities and if the university has a support program for it, they can say we have a structure in place that you can take advantage of.” This is an important and emerging topic happening in schools and athletic programs across America, and if you’re a journalist looking to know more, then let us help with your questions and coverage. Dr. David Hunt is available to speak with media regarding student athletes now being able to profit from their name, image and likeness – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
American Rescue Plan Act can do more to address racial wealth inequality
While the American Rescue Plan Act provided a major infusion of economic aid to low-income and middle-class Americans, more should be done to tackle racial wealth inequality and the structural issues in the tax code that allow those at the top of the income distribution to benefit disproportionately from tax subsidies, an Indiana University professor wrote. Goldburn P. Maynard Jr., assistant professor of business law and ethics at the IU Kelley School of Business, analyzed the American Rescue Plan Act's major provisions to determine their potential impact on racial equity, presenting his findings in Yale Law Journal. The article, "Biden's Gambit: Advancing Racial Equity While Relying on a Race-Neutral Tax Code," was published Jan. 9 and is part of a series that examines the novel tax implications of the American Rescue Plan Act through the lens of fiscal impoverishment, race, unemployment insurance, and state and local responses to economic crises. "While analysis reveals that the Biden Administration made some progress on (racial equity) through ARPA, in the months since its passage, federal courts have undermined some of this progress by halting race-conscious equity programs in ARPA," wrote Maynard, who worked as an estate tax attorney for the Internal Revenue Service before entering academia. His essay argues that "race consciousness is central to achieving" racial equity and "requires more than traditional policies that target financial need." The bulk of the stimulus measure focused on redistribution through the tax system, which does not incorporate racism and other dimensions of social inequity into its notions of fairness, Maynard wrote. To this day, the IRS does not collect racial data on taxpayers. He also noted that several policies targeted people or groups based on need. For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development in November provided $14 million in American Rescue Plan funds to support fair housing organizations. But few new policies under the plan have addressed systemic discrimination, and most were designed to be temporary, such as the child tax credit. "Where these policies fall short is their lack of focus on historic systemic discrimination," Maynard wrote. "ARPA does not tackle the central issues that lead to racial inequity in the first place. Because RE requires the consideration social hierarchy and historical injustices, these provisions of ARPA are not as impactful as others." Several core policies in the American Rescue Plan Act target individuals or groups based on need, particularly racial minorities, he said. But several courts with conservative judges have treated race-based policies designed to counteract racial inequities as discriminatory in their interpretations of the Constitution. "Today, many courts equate efforts to promote RE with efforts to promote racial segregation. The odds of having all three branches in perfect alignment are slim," Maynard wrote. "ARPA also illustrates weaknesses in our current understanding of the Constitution as limiting the government's ability to redress historic wrongs. The status quo limitations are so strong that it is hard to imagine any large pro-equality advancements in the foreseeable future. "At our current pace, achieving RE will be a centuries-long project. This is discouraging, but highlights the importance of continuing the fight for wealth taxation and other levies on capital. It also underscores the smallness of the tax system when tackling a problem as embedded as RE. There are many decisions, regulations and laws that have embedded racism structurally and systematically. The tax system serves as an efficient compensator of harm, but this is not always what the victims of harm want. Instead of after-the-fact compensation for discrimination, victims of inequities often prefer to have the discrimination eliminated. That is the purpose of RE. The tax system can play an important role in promoting RE, even if it is not the leading one."
Comfort Women – UConn expert weighs in as a dark piece of history returns to light
A recent article in an academic journal claiming that Korean comfort women -- imprisoned, raped, and subjected to brutal atrocities during World War II -- were "prostitutes" who had willingly entered indentured contracts set off a firestorm of controversy and a chorus from historians and academics calling for the paper's retraction. It's a topic garnering international attention as survivors continue to seek resolution, compensation, and acknowledgement of the past. UConn's Alexis Dudden is a professor of history specializing in Japan and Korea who has heard stories from survivors first-hand and is among those scholars calling out the erroneous claims: A recent academic journal article by the professor — in which he described as “prostitutes” the Korean and other women forced to serve Japan’s troops — prompted an outcry in South Korea and among scholars in the United States. It also offered a chance, on the Zoom call last week, for the aging survivor of the Japanese Imperial Army’s brothels to tell her story to a group of Harvard students, including her case for why Japan should issue a full apology and face international prosecution. “The recent remarks by the professor at Harvard are something that you should all ignore,” Lee Yong-soo, a 92-year-old in South Korea and one of just a handful of so-called comfort women still living, told the students. But the remarks were a “blessing in disguise” because they created a huge controversy, added Ms. Lee, who was kidnapped by Japanese soldiers during World War II and raped repeatedly. “So this is kind of a wake up call.” The dispute over the academic paper has echoes of the early 1990s, a time when the world was first beginning to hear the voices of survivors of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery in Asia — traumas that the region’s conservative patriarchal cultures had long downplayed. Now, survivors’ testimony drives much of the academic narrative on the topic. Yet many scholars say that conservative forces are once again trying to marginalize the survivors. “This is so startling, 30 years later, to be dragged back, because in the meantime survivors from a wide range of countries found a voice,” Alexis Dudden, a historian of Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut who has interviewed the women. In dual articles from The New Yorker and The New York Times, Dr. Dudden weighed in on the controversial journal article and offered her findings on the atrocities committed against the women: Alexis Dudden, the historian of Japan and Korea, was one of the scholars invited to publish a reply to Ramseyer in the journal. In her comment, she observes that a reason for studying past atrocities is to try to prevent similar occurrences in the future, “not to abuse history by weaponizing it for present purposes.” She told me of meeting Korean comfort women in Tokyo, in 2000, at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. “One of them had her tongue cut out,” she said. “Another woman literally lifted up her hanbok to show me where one of her breasts had been lopped off.” Dudden said that the tribunal was “a big watershed in terms of understanding how oral testimony really was necessary, to shift the legal approach but also in terms of doing historical evidence gathering” in the study of crimes against humanity. In some sense, such testimony of atrocities is seemingly irrefutable. But historians such as Dudden continually seek to verify it, producing knowledge of unspeakable horrors, through cycles of historical denial, political conflict, and diplomatic irresolution. If you are a journalist covering this topic, Dr. Dudden is available to speak with media about how history is playing a role in the current controversy. Click on her icon to arrange an interview today.
Why are U.S. corporate boards under-diversified?
Research tells us that firms with diverse workforces generally outperform those that do not. And in recent years, corporate America has taken significant strides towards greater heterogeneity in the employee base. But a problem remains at the top. U.S. boardrooms remain overwhelmingly Anglo Saxon and male. No less than 81 percent of the Standard & Poor (S&P) 1500 Index directors in America today are white men. White women account for 11 percent, while ethnic minority men make up 6 percent. Meanwhile, female minority board members account for just 2 percent of the total. For businesses, this is becoming problematic, not least because institutional investors and regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission have started asking firms to open up about their processes in selecting board members. Where diversity is a criterion, firms are required to be transparent about specifications and frameworks. Shedding light on this issue is new research from Grace Pownall, professor of accounting, and Justin Short, assistant professor of accounting, at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Together with Zawadi Lemayian of Washington University, they parsed 12 years of data on gender, ethnicity, and salaries from the S&P 1500 to build a composite picture of who’s who and who’s paid what in U.S. boardrooms. What they found points to a systemic shortage of female and minority executives making it onto shortlists for board appointments. But that’s not all. Once women and minority men do make it onto the board, there’s another roadblock waiting for them: they are not getting promoted at the same rate as their white, male counterparts. There seem to be two complex dynamics at play, said Short: a glass ceiling effect hampering the upward trajectory of Black, female, and other minority executives, and what he and his co-authors call “myopic” bias on the part of corporate America. “We developed two hypotheses that might explain what’s behind the lack of diversity on boards,” explained Short. “The glass ceiling hypothesis comes from what we see as a shortfall of women and ethnic minorities in the workforce relative to white men—so the theory here is that these groups just aren’t getting promoted to the point where they would be considered for board positions.” “The alternative hypothesis we worked on was that there might actually be a plentiful supply, but that companies just don’t see directors from different backgrounds as being as valuable in the same way,” he said. “And we would put this down to some kind of institutional myopia or bias at the very highest echelons of business.” To put these hypotheses to the test, Short and his colleagues first collected demographical data on American board members from a database compiled by Institutional Shareholders Services. Here they were able to determine the gender and ethnicity of individuals. They also ran a simple statistical regression on salaries using data from S&P. Then they compared the two. “Economic theory tells us that if there’s a high demand for diverse directors—women and ethnic minorities—and there’s a low supply of them, then these directors will be able to command higher salaries than others,” said Short. “It’s a simple case of supply and demand, and minorities will come at a greater premium.” Looking at the S&P 1500 data, they found that female and minority directors were indeed getting paid more on average than white male counterparts in other companies. And when they analyzed this more closely, Short and his co-authors found that these salaries were in general being paid by larger, more successful firms. “We can see that women and minorities are commanding higher compensation than the average white male director across the S&P universe of 1500 companies, and it’s the bigger, better paying firms that are hiring them,” Short said. “So that tells us that the top companies are proactively trying to build diversity in their boardrooms. At the same time, it shows there is a deficit of supply in this talent pool—the so-called glass ceiling dynamic.” To understand whether bias or institutional myopia might also be limiting the prospects of Black, female, and ethnic directors, Short et al. also looked at differences in compensation within the same company, and here they found something striking. While they made more on average than the typical white male director in U.S. firms, minority directors were being paid around 3 percent less than their direct counterparts – the white male directors on the same board. All this scrutiny begs the questions: What is going on in the American boardroom? And why is there still such a stark lack of diversity in the upper echelons of business in the U.S. today? “This tells us something important,” said Short. “Once these directors make it to the board, for most of them that’s it. They don’t advance or achieve promotion at the same rate.” This could be due to bias or what Short calls a Rolodex effect: “Maybe it’s because they didn’t go to the same school as the chairman of the board, or weren’t connected socially in the same way, so they don’t appear in the Rolodex of candidates with right or familiar credentials to get promoted within the board,” he said. “We know it’s not about hard skills or aptitudes because the data shows us that women and minority directors typically hold more qualifications than their counterparts. But for whatever reason, once they are on the board, they fail to advance in the same way as white men.” Interestingly, Short and his colleagues found that there was a very small number of women and minority directors sitting on the boards of multiple companies in the U.S. “Pulling it all together, we see that there’s a generalized shortage of women and ethnic group candidates in the U.S.,” Short said. “Successful companies are proactively on the lookout for them and offer higher compensation to attract them. “But there seems to be a glass ceiling effect acting as a bottle neck for talent. We also see that minority directors become a bit stuck once they’re on a board. The upward momentum tails off relative to their white, male colleagues. This could be due to bias or myopic thinking.” All of this should provide rich food for thought for the most senior decision-makers in U.S. enterprises, according to Short and his co-authors. With the pressure on to drive board-level diversity in corporate American, leaders need to be cognizant of the roadblocks or cut-off points to tie to ethnicity and gender. “Diversity is something we urgently need to enable and nurture in the United States. Without diversity, creativity and innovation can stall, and in business you run the risk of deferring to group think—sourcing ideas and perspectives from the same small pool of shared experience or expertise,” said Short. “It’s encouraging to see that diversity has increased over time and the largest companies are proactive. But there are still vast gaps of representation on the board compared to the workforce. There’s still work to be done because diversity in American business should be commonplace.” If you are a journalist looking to cover this research or to learn more about the diversification of corporate boards in America, then let our experts help. Grace Pownall, professor of accounting, and Justin Short, assistant professor of accounting, at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School are both available for interviews; simply click on either expert's icon to arrange a time today.
Heads up CFOs: The capital asset pricing model still rules
Firms invest in various things: bonds, stocks or other assets—new stores, new premises or even other firms. And they do so to earn maximum value from available cash that would otherwise be idle. For example, for the last five years Walmart generated an annual cash flow of more than $25 billion from its operations. The retailer has the option to channel this cash into opening new stores, ultimately growing its business and profits. Alternatively, Walmart can pay the cash out to its shareholders in the form of dividends, or through share repurchases. So far, it’s been productive. However, this win-win scenario is contingent on successfully navigating a number of complexities. Primary among these is that to invest optimally, you first need to determine the correct hurdle rate for that investment. Hurdle rates are the minimum rates of return that firms seek on their investments. The hurdle rate is the appropriate compensation commensurate with the investments’ risk. Therefore, the higher the risk, the higher the hurdle rate needs to be. For instance, a hurdle rate of 10% means that for every $100 invested, you would expect to earn an average of $10 average per year. But it’s tricky. You have to calculate the right hurdle rate that would add the most value for your shareholders—the optimal rate of return for you and your business. Too high and there’s risk of missing out on a good investment. If your right hurdle rate is 10%, but you mistakenly opt for 15%, you’re likely to ignore any investment that is projected to earn you less than 15%, but more than 10% is likely to be missed. As a result, you’ll end up leaving money on the table. Too low a hurdle rate and you’re in danger of burning money. Again, supposing your hurdle rate should be 10%, but you set it at 5%, you’re likely to end up investing in things with a suboptimal return. In the end, you’re wasting your cash on low value investments when you could be paying it directly to your shareholders in dividends and giving them the chance to earn 10% return on their own. For the last 50 years, the financial world has built models to calculate hurdle rates and rates of return. But which one works best? Shedding critical new light on this is a recently published paper by Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Dean’s Distinguished Chair of Finance at Goizueta, entitled “Empirical tests of asset pricing models with individual assets.” Jegadeesh and his co-authors developed new statistical methods to differentiate among a raft of new models that have been developed in recent years and to compare their efficacy to that of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), a model introduced in the 1960s. What they found is that none of the newer models work any better than the CAPM in determining the appropriate hurdle rate or rate of return of an asset. That paper is attached and is required reading for CFOs and anyone interested in the Capital Asset Pricing Model. If you are looking to know more, or if you are a journalist interested in covering this important aspect of business and investing – then let our experts help. Narasimhan Jegadeesh is Dean’s Distinguished Chair of Finance at Goizueta. He is a renowned expert in this field and has been published extensively in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies and other leading academic finance journals. His research has been discussed in several publications including Businessweek, The Economist, Forbes, Kiplinger's Personal Investments, Money, New York Times, and Smart Money.
People with outgoing personalities get noticed. Heads turn toward those with charismatic voices, emotional speech, high energy, empathetic gestures, and engaging smiles, but on the corporate front, how do these traits come to bear on executive compensation, hiring, and firm outcomes? “The short answer is that extraversion is associated with positive career and firm outcomes,” said T. Clifton Green, professor of finance at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, whose published work Executive Extraversion: Career Firm and Outcomes (The Accounting Review, 2019), explores this phenomenon. The study, with coauthors Russell Jame 10PhD, University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics, and Brandon Lock 12BBA Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, City University of New York, highlights the role of personality traits in explaining executive promotions, job tenure, and outside board service. Green also finds evidence that having an extraverted CEO bodes well for investor recognition, sales growth, and acquisitions. The study goes on to explain the personality trait of Extraversion, which is often described as “the single most important aspect of an individual’s personality,” according to Green, with the other of the Big Five traits being Agreeableness, Openness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness. Extraverts tend to be outgoing and gain energy from being around others, whereas introverts tend to be more reserved and recharge through solitude. Psychology research identifies extraversion as the personality trait most closely associated with leadership emergence. The study linked above is available for reading – and if you are a journalist looking to learn more or cover this very interesting topic, then let our experts help. T. Clifton Green is a Professor of Finance at the Goizueta Business School. He is an expert in the areas of market microstructure, with an emphasis on behavioral finance and his research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Financial Times, and on CNBC.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- During the pandemic, the amount of screen time for many people working and learning from home as well as binge-watching TV has sharply increased. New research finds that wearing blue-light glasses just before sleeping can lead to a better night's sleep and contribute to a better day's work to follow. "We found that wearing blue-light-filtering glasses is an effective intervention to improve sleep, work engagement, task performance and organizational citizenship behavior, and reduced counterproductive work behavior," said Cristiano L. Guarana, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. "Wearing blue-light-filtering glasses creates a form of physiologic darkness, thus improving both sleep quantity and quality." Most of the technology we commonly use -- such as computer screens, smartphones and tablets -- emits blue light, which past research has found can disrupt sleep. Workers have become more dependent on these devices, especially as we navigate remote work and school during the coronavirus pandemic. The media have recently reported on the benefits of blue-light glasses for those spending a lot of time in front of a computer screen. This new research extends understanding of the circadian rhythm, a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. "In general, the effects of wearing blue-light-filtering glasses were stronger for 'night owls' than for 'morning larks,' said Guarana, who previously has studied how lack of sleep affects business decisions, relationships and other behaviors in organizations. "Owls tend to have sleep periods later in the day, whereas larks tend to have sleep periods early in the day. "Although most of us can benefit from reducing our exposure to blue light, owl employees seem to benefit more because they encounter greater misalignments between their internal clock and the externally controlled work time. Our model highlights how and when wearing blue-light-filtering glasses can help employees to live and work better." The findings appear in the paper, "The Effects of Blue-Light Filtration on Sleep and Work Outcomes," published online by the Journal of Applied Psychology. Guarana is the corresponding author; his co-authors are Christopher Barnes and Wei Jee Ong of the University of Washington. The research found that daily engagement and performance of tasks may be related to more underlying biological processes such as the circadian process. "Our research pushes the chronotype literature to consider the relationship between the timing of circadian processes and employees' performance," the researchers wrote. A good night's sleep not only benefits workers; it also helps their employers' bottom lines. "This study provides evidence of a very cost-effective means of improving employee sleep and work outcomes, and the implied return on investment is gigantic," said Barnes, professor of management and the Evert McCabe Endowed Fellow at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. "I personally do not know of any other interventions that would be that powerful at that low of a cost." Across two studies, researcher collected data from 63 company managers and 67 call center representatives at Brazil-based offices for a U.S. multinational financial firm and measured task performance from clients. Participants were randomly chosen to test glasses that filtered blue light or those that were placebo glasses. "Employees are often required to work early mornings, which may lead to a misalignment between their internal clock and the externally controlled work time," the researchers said, adding that their analyses showed a general pattern that blue-light filtration can have a cumulative effect on key performance variables, at least in the short term. "Blue-light exposure should also be of concern to organizations," Guarana said. "The ubiquity of the phenomenon suggests that control of blue-light exposure may be a viable first step for organizations to protect the circadian cycles of their employees from disruption." Researchers received no financial support or compensation for this research. The glasses were donated by the Austin, Texas-based company Swanwick.
Cancellation of non-conference college football games may lead to a new battle in the courtroom
The Big Ten Conference's decision to cancel all non-conference football games for the upcoming season -- and the possibility that schools in other major conferences may soon follow -- raises a number of potential legal issues, says Nathaniel Grow, associate professor of business law and ethics at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. “Depending on the terms of the schools' college football scheduling agreement, the university cancelling the game may still owe the other school some level of compensation for breaking the agreement,” Grow said. “If the cancelling university refuses to pay, then it would not be surprising if the other school would elect to file a lawsuit.” A nationally recognized expert in the field of sports law, Grow studied has studied this issue, the subject of a 2010 article in the Journal of College and University Law. "The ultimate outcome of such a lawsuit would hinge largely on the specific terms of two affected schools' contract. In general, though, two provisions of the contract would likely prove to be the most important. First, most scheduling agreements will include some sort of liquidated damages provision, a clause that specifies that one side of the agreement must pay the other party a certain amount of money should the contract be broken. Often times, these contracts will provide that the breaching party must only pay the other school in the event that the opponent is unable to replace the cancelled game on its schedule with one against a sufficiently suitable alternative opponent. "The other relevant clause in these scheduling agreements is likely to be the force majeure provision, sometimes referred to as an ‘Act of God’ clause. Under these provisions, schools may be excused from cancelling a game without penalty if circumstances arise that make playing the game unduly difficult or impossible (for instance, a hurricane or other major weather event). The applicability of such a provision will also vary depending on the specific wording employed in the contract, and whether the clause permits a team to cancel a game on the basis of either a pandemic or a change in conference policy regarding the playing of non-conference games." Grow can be reached at 812-855-8191 or grown@iu.edu.
Who should pay for the opioid epidemic? – In latest lawsuit, drug stores say it's the doctors
It’s lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit as blame, accountability and, eventually, restitution is sought as the opioid epidemic's damage is sorted out across courtrooms in America. The latest turn in the road is that major drug store chains are now suing doctors in the bell-weather area of northeast Ohio with a claim that it is those with the pen and prescription pad that need to own the responsibility for the rampant opioid abuse across the country. “CVS, Walgreen Co., Walmart, Rite Aid and other major pharmacy chains said opioid prescribers bear responsibility for the prescription narcotic crisis, but unlike the drugstores, have not been sued by Cuyahoga and Summit counties. In legal papers filed Monday, they contended that doctors and other prescribers should have to pay some of the penalty if the drugstore chains are found liable at trial.” January 07 - Washington Post With billions at stake and the fates of big-pharma, drug stores and distributors, and now doctors now in the hands of the justice system – what’s next? How long will these lawsuits be tied up in court? Will the victims and families of the hundreds of thousands of Americans impacted by the opioid epidemic ever see compensation? And is this a matter of finding one sector or segment accountable or in these instances, will it be shared? There are a lot of questions to be asked, and that’s where the experts from the University of Connecticut can help. Alexandra Lahav is an expert in complex litigation, class actions, and mass torts, and is the author of a prize-winning book, In Praise of Litigation. Alexandra is available to speak with media regarding the mass of opioid epidemic lawsuits – simply click on her icon to arrange an interview.
What's Ahead for California's Gig Workers?
A new law is set to take effect in California on January 1 that could significantly shift the landscape for the "gig economy" and freelancers across the state: Assembly Bill 5 (or AB 5) will require businesses to reclassify workers like ridesharing and food app delivery drivers as employees and not contractors, giving them access to minimum wage and benefits such as overtime, workers' compensation and health insurance. Another group that's targeted in the legislation are freelance journalists. (Vox Media, the parent company of sports site SB Nation, has already taken action and laid off hundreds of freelancers before the law goes into effect.) Villanova University professor Cheryl Carleton, PhD, is an expert on labor economics and the workforce who, in conjunction with Mary Kelly, PhD, recently published research on alternative work arrangements and job satisfaction. "By making them regular employees of the company, workers that firms do hire would gain some benefits, and the government may gain some unemployment insurance payments," Dr. Carleton said about California's AB 5 legislation. "Such a law may be great for them. However, other workers will be worse off because they will be losing just what they wanted—the ability to work when and where they want." "Some of these workers may already have needed benefits through a spouse or significant other or through another job," she continued. "Perhaps they are retired and already have access to those benefits. Still, other workers may not be able to take a regular job with its rigid hours, so they will not be able to work at all." Dr. Carleton also noted that there is a larger issue about how benefits are provided in our economy. "Benefits such as medical insurance, pensions and sick and disability leave are provided through one's place of employment. To the extent that these other working arrangements are growing in popularity, the best approach may be for us to rethink how such benefits are offered," she shared. "It may be that more should be offered by the government to citizens, which then would allow them the ability to choose the job(s) they want that fill the needs they have." To speak with Dr. Carleton or Dr. Kelly, please click on the "View Profile" links featured on this page.
