ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

Recent Submissions

  • Publication
    A Case for COUNTER
    (Routledge, 2025-02-16) Waite, Patrick
    In the modern library landscape digital assets have become a critical component of our collections. Usage data and statistics have become more and more relied upon in the decision-making process of collection development. Thinking about my position as a Collection Analysis Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, having reliable and trusted data and standards at our disposal is crucial for ensuring our patrons have the material they need for their research as well as for evaluating financial constraints and impacts of supporting the variety of resources we have.
  • Publication
    Implicit Coordination in Sellers' Inflation: How Cost Shocks Facilitate Price Hikes
    (2025-06) Weber, Isabella Maria; Wasner, Evan; Lang, Markus; Braun, Benjamin; van 't Klooster, Jens
    Supply shocks are now widely recognized as a driver of the recent inflation bout, but the role of firms’ pricing strategies in propagating input cost shocks remains contested. In this paper, we review the state of the academic debate over sellers’ inflation and assess whether, in line with this theory, economy-wide cost shocks have functioned as an implicit coordination mechanism for firms to hike prices. We use a dataset containing 138,962 corporate earnings call transcripts of 4,823 stock-market listed U.S. corporations from the period 2007-Q1 to 2022-Q2 to conduct sentiment analysis via both dictionary-based natural language processing and a large language model approach. We find that large input price shocks (as well as their co-occurrence with supply constraints) correlate with positive sentiments expressed in executives’ statements about cost increases. Qualitative analysis provides further insights into the reasoning behind executives’ optimism regarding their ability to turn an economy-wide cost shock into an opportunity to raise prices and protect or even increase profits.
  • Publication
    Chemical, morphological, and phenological traits of blueberry cultivars predict susceptibility to a pollinator-vectored fungal pathogen [Data and Statistical Analysis Code]
    (2025) Clemente, Seanne R.; Adler, Lynn; Salminen, Juha-Pekka; Engström, Marica T.; Baert, Nicolas; McArt, Scott H.
    Several crops are threatened by pollinator-vectored plant pathogens, which can reduce fruit yield and quality. Domestication has frequently increased crop susceptibility to plant pathogens, but significant cultivar variation in resistance typically exists. While it is well known that floral traits can shape plant-pollinator-pathogen interactions in natural and managed systems, little is known regarding how morphological, phenological, and chemical traits combine to shape resistance in domesticated plant species. Here, we address this topic by 1) conducting a common garden field experiment where we measured percent of tissues infected by the fungal pathogen Monilinia vaccini-corymbosii in 14 cultivars of highbush blueberries (Vaccinium spp.) and 2) using a three-pronged multivariate approach of PCA, random forest, and LASSO regressions to single out predictors of cultivar resistance from a suite of phenological, morphological, and chemical (oxidatively active phenolics) traits collected from the field. Leaf and floral traits varied between cultivars, and we found that concentrations of phenolics (chlorogenic acid and total phenolics) in leaves were strong predictors of cultivar resistance to the primary infection stage of M. vaccini-corymbosii, while floral phenology and carpel phenolics (procyanidin-containing proanthocyanidins and quercetin derivatives) predicted resistance to the secondary infection stage. Our findings highlight that intraspecific variation in chemical and phenological traits as a result of breeding can shape plant-pollinator-pathogen dynamics. This information could be used in future trait-based breeding efforts to increase resistance to disease.
  • Publication
    Source data for reversible self-coiling of microfibers with tailored surfaces via elastocapillarity
    (2025) Hu, Xin; Einck, Vincent; Chia, Eric; Pagaduan, James Nicolas; Moed, Demi; Emrick, Todd; Katsumata, Reika; Nonnenmann, Stephen; Watkins, James; Crosby, Alfred