SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Berkshire Hathaway’s $32.6 billion buyout of Precision Castparts Corp.

By Sunil Mithas

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Customers have kvetched about airline baggage fees since American Airlines started charging people for even one checked bag in 2008, but the practice has swept the industry. Last month, JetBlue started charging passengers for luggage, leaving Southwest standing alone as the only company to let all passengers check a bag or two without an extra charge.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Is "quarterly capitalism" a problem for the American economy? Hillary Clinton hopes to make the alleged short-term focus of corporations an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Median home prices have surged past the U.S. record set in 2006 at the peak of the real estate bubble, but don’t expect a repeat of the Great Recession. Instead, a mortgage risk expert at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business expects an eventual market slowdown driven by a mixture of negative and positive factors.

High school English teachers from across the United States gathered this summer at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business to develop lesson plans that will blend literature with the history and philosophy of enterprise.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- China and other overseas stock market turmoil, plus the Fed waffling on an interest rate hike, are elevating the degree of difficulty for U.S.

Research into optimizing blood bank donations has garnered PhD student Tianshu Sun a finalist position in a math competition organized by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Do you have gender "faultlines" in your organization? New research from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business suggests that such fissures appear when gender differences solidify into cliques.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- The #RadioShackisBack campaign starring the likes of Orlando Jones and Carlos Mencia reminds consumers that the company remains alive after a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2015 and the closure of more than half of its 4,000 stores. Nonetheless, a