Welcome to eScholarShare!
eScholarShare is the open access repository of Drake University that collects, preserves, and distributes materials produced or maintained by the Drake community. The purpose of eScholarShare is to make Drake University’s digital scholarship available to a global audience and to provide reliable digital storage. Journal articles, conference papers, instructional resources, student projects, theses, dissertations, and university archival materials are all candidates for deposit.
Submitting your work to eScholarShare is easy. For more information, please contact Bart Schmidt, bart.schmidt@drake.edu.
Recent Submissions
Item Weathering the Storm: Evaluating Captive Insurance for Iowa Cooperatives in Crisis(Drake Management Review, 2023-04)Iowa agricultural cooperatives are facing a crisis in obtaining affordable and comprehensive property and casualty insurance due to the withdrawal of major carriers and significant increases in premiums and deductibles. The regulatory requirements for property and casualty insurance and its importance for securing commercial loans make this crisis particularly concerning. This paper examines captive insurance as an alternative for Iowa cooperatives, outlining the benefits and challenges of a self-insurance model. While captive insurance offers customization, potential cost savings, tax incentives, and risk management benefits, cooperatives must consider high start-up costs, limited risk pooling, and selective admission. The paper also discusses strategies for overcoming these challenges, such as purchasing reinsurance and diversifying captive membership. The issue will be further explored at an upcoming cooperative CFO conference in June 2023.Item Career Opportunities in the Iowa Insurance Industry(Drake Management Review, 2023-04)The Iowa insurance industry is an economic powerhouse, creating an $8.9 billion impact in the Des Moines – West Des Moines MSA alone. The industry’s scale has spawned two start-up accelerators focused on insurtech, each with a global reach. The Iowa workforce has experienced twenty-five percent growth since 2000. Insurance carriers are attractive employers exhibited through a high level of compensation, wage growth at a rate above the national average, and a suite of employee benefits that are generous, flexible, and well-aligned with the desires of generation Z. Over the next decade, nearly twenty percent of the workforce will reach retirement age. This retirement wave will create rapid advancement opportunities for younger employees, especially those with skills in technology, data analytics, distribution, and product development. The demand for actuaries is expected to grow at a rate three times greater than the average occupation while actuarial compensation exceeds the median annual salary of other mathematical science occupations. Actuarial careers are consistently ranked among the best in both business and STEM fields and have above-average upward mobility.Item Suggestions for Solving Cheating Scandals at Public Accounting Firms(Drake Management Review, 2023-04)The purpose of this paper is to provide suggestions that may help to resolve problems that public accounting firms have experienced with employees cheating on the AICPA’s ethics exam and on training exams, including Continuing Professional Education (CPE) exams. To form these suggestions, we analyzed the recent cheating scandal at Ernst & Young (EY) that was widely publicized in June 2022. Our suggestions include: (1) impose more effective penalties and deterrents; (2) redesign the ethics exam; (3) implement mandatory time for CPE and provide confidential outplacement services, and (4) rethink CPE requirements for the profession as a whole.Item State of Iowa vs. Sam Craft, Brief for the Appellant(2023)2023 Supreme Court Competition Problem: Sam Craft lives in a small home on Birch Street in Eldora, Iowa. Craft owns the home and is its sole occupant. The back yard is surrounded by a fence. The front yard is unfenced. There are four other houses on Birch Street, which is a short dead-end side street. Birch Street connects onto Main Street, between a grocery store and a small church. In early 2020, DCI Special Agent Trails suspected that there was some activity related to fentanyl trafficking at Craft’s residence. She obtained permission from the city to install a small digital video camera on a telephone pole just across the street from Craft’s residence. Throughout 2021, the camera was active and pointed at the front of Craft’s house. Agent Trails monitored the feed. She could also review footage, after the fact. She was able to zoom in to get enough detail to see license plate numbers or facial expressions. But most of the time, the camera was zoomed out to capture a wider shot of the exterior of Craft’s home. No part of the interior of Craft’s home is visible in any of the footage that Agent Trails used. In March 2022, Special Agent Trails applied for a warrant to search Craft’s home. In her search warrant application, she relied on that video footage to establish a pattern of what looked like mid-level drug distribution activity: regular visits by known users and low-level dealers, and bi-weekly visits from a subject with no other known connection to Eldora, who drove a different rental vehicle on each visit to Craft’s residence. A magistrate found probable cause to issue the search warrant. Agents found a large quantity of fentanyl in his home, and evidence that would help prove an ongoing intent to distribute it (including drug ledgers, scales, and packaging supplies). Craft was charged with possession of fentanyl with intent to deliver. Craft moved to suppress all the evidence discovered during the search of his home. He argued that the search warrant was issued based on evidence that was obtained through a warrantless search that violated Craft’s rights under the Fourth Amendment. The State argued that warrantless visual surveillance of the area surrounding a home does not constitute a search. The State argued that any subjective expectation of privacy in activities that occur in public view—just outside of Craft’s residence—would never be objectively reasonable. And if there’s no expectation of privacy, the State is free to view and record that activity. The District Court granted Craft’s Motion to Suppress. It acknowledged that the unfenced front yard of Craft’s home was open to public view. But it held that surreptitious, continuous surveillance of the front of a private home for an entire year is unreasonably invasive and violates a reasonable expectation of privacy—even if widespread availability of new technology makes it easy to do. So it ruled that using the pole camera was a search that violated the Fourth Amendment, and it suppressed all of the evidence found through the search warrant. The State appealed, and the Iowa Supreme Court retained the appeal. The State must convince the Justices that the district court was incorrect, and using this pole camera was not a search. Craft must convince the Justices that the district court got it right, and that this as a search. This is a novel, complex, and difficult issue—but our intrepid finalists are up to the task!Item Food Stamps: The Impact on Consumer Expenditure Behavior(Drake Management Review, 2022-10)The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, is one of the largest and most important federal assistance programs provided by the United States government. The purpose of the program is to promote proper nutrition for low-income consumers. This paper analyzes the effect of SNAP benefits on consumer spending behavior. Using survey data on food expenditures from 2012-2014, regressions were run on how receiving SNAP benefits impacted average weekly expenditures for different categories of food. The results indicate that SNAP-receiving households spend less on total food per week compared to non-recipients. In addition, SNAP benefits correlated with higher expenditures on unhealthy food, with inconclusive evidence on how the benefits impacted spending on healthy foods. This indicates that the purpose of SNAP is not being fulfilled as intended.
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