The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework/process approach to guide teaching technology based entrepreneurship at the graduate level. The necessary conditions for engaging angel investors have been well documented in the literature. However, over the past 20 years less than 4% of those submitting comprehensive business plans are actually given offer sheets by angel investors. Figure 1 offers a conceptual framework for teaching the business planning process. The first three steps are essential to get to a business plan with the necessary conditions to be able to get to an offer sheet from an angel investor. These are documented in the right hand column of step four in Figure 1. The left hand column offers an improved list of relationship factors based upon our current research. These relationship factors are now taking on equal importance to the right hand column. This is a fundamental contribution in the current article. Shawn Carson's doctoral dissertation researched the angel investor process in the Southeast United States using a Delphi method [1]. A major finding of this research was that among the comprehensive list of factors critical to decision making process of investors, the relationship factors ranked higher in importance as a category than objective based risk factors. In this Delphi study of angel investors and venture capitalists eight of the 20 or 40% of the critical risk factors identified in the top quartile importance were relationship based factors (see Table 1). This is a Eureka moment for us because we had not underscored the relationship factors in the past so this is a major addition to our framework for teaching technology based entrepreneurship. In the past we had the output from the real opportunity test that gave us the right hand column in step four. That was the end of our teaching. Now we are adding the relationship factors that are equally important to the necessary conditions. This will give us enhanced results with angel investors. This ranking of relationship factors was more important than management team and surprisingly of greater importance than financial risk. What makes this finding so important is that in the early stages of the decision making process this is one of the most obscure reasons. The addition of these relationship factors should provide the sufficiency conditions for obtaining an angel investment offer in the Southeast. While many of the investors discuss the importance of passion and coachability few acknowledge these relationship aspects as more important than traditional measures such as market size and team execution. This research suggests that relationship oriented characteristics when evaluated alongside objective risk factors were more important.

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Coastal archaeological sites are threatened by a host of environmental change processes, including sea level rise, land subsidence, and shoreline erosion. The rates at which these processes have been occurring are increasing, exacerbated by climate change, and are expected to increase even more rapidly in the future. This will cause further loss of archaeological sites and with them, the loss of our knowledge of how coastal inhabitants lived and interacted with their landscape. My research assesses the vulnerability of prehistoric and Contact period Native American sites situated around Indian Field Creek in Virginia. This area saw multiple prehistoric occupations, culminating in the protohistoric village of Kiskiak, which was part of the Powhatan chiefdom at the time of European contact. Recent archaeological excavations and the careful study of shell middens found in this area have added to our knowledge of how the Kiskiak people dwelled within this landscape and interacted with their environment. However, field observations have revealed that these midden deposits are actively being eroded. My research takes into consideration a variety of environmental and cultural variables to determine which sites in this area are most at risk from the natural environment and which would be the greatest loss to our understanding of the past if they were washed away from the archaeological record. The results of this research presented here provide guidance for environmental and cultural managers to best preserve the archaeological record and our knowledge of the native people of this region.

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Thesis advisor: Robert Murphy / The following three essays address two issues that have gained much recent attention among macroeconomists. The first essay - "International Policy Coordination: Policy Analysis in a Staggered Wage-setting Model" - deals with the incentives for countries to coordinate monetary and fiscal policies in an environment where the countries differ only in the length of the labor contracts which typify their respective economies. The second essay - "Tests for Liquidity Constraints: A Critique" and the third essay - "Liquidity Constraint Volatility: Evidence from Post-war Aggregate Time-series Data" - are tests of the importance and persistence of liquidity constraints in determining consumption behavior in the United States using micro-based data and aggregate timeseries data, respectively. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 1988. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Abstract is available to download.

Abstract is available to download.

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In this dissertation, I develop a framework to investigate the implications of Affirmative Action in college admissions on both study effort choice and college placement outcomes for high school students. I model the college admissions process as a Bayesian game where heterogeneous students compete for seats at colleges and universities of varying prestige. There is an allocation mechanism which maps each student's achieved test score into a seat at some college. A colorblind mechanism ignores race, while Affirmative Action mechanisms may give preferential treatment to minorities in a variety of ways. The particular form of the mechanism determines how students' study effort is linked with their payoff, playing a key roll in shaping behavior. I use the model to evaluate the ability of a given college admission policy to promote academic achievement and to minimize racial academic gaps--namely, the achievement gap and the college enrollment gap. On the basis of these criteria, I derive a qualitative comparison of three canonical classes of college admissions policies: color-blind admissions, quotas, and admission preferences. I also perform an empirical policy analysis of Affirmative Action (AA) in US college admissions, using data from 1996 on American colleges, freshman admissions, and entrance test scores to measure actual AA practices in the American college market. Minority college applicants in the United States effectively benefit from a 9% inflation of their SAT scores, as well as a small fixed bonus of approximately 34 SAT points. I also estimate distributions over student heterogeneity and perform a series of counterfactual policy experiments. This procedure shows that AA practices in the US significantly improve college placement outcomes for minorities, at the cost of discouraging achievement by the most and least talented students. The analysis also indicates ways in which AA could be re-designed in order to better achieve its objectives. As it turns out, a quota system produces a substantial improvement relative to either the current system or a color-blind system. However, quotas are illegal in the US and cannot be implemented as such. Nevertheless, I propose a variation on the AA policy already in place that is outcome-equivalent to a quota.

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