The best way to teach business students to be prudent with investments is to give them some money to spend. At Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, they started with $100,000 -- a gift from 1984 graduate Vincent Intrieri.

"When you're working with a mock portfolio and you mess up, there's no damage done," said Vincent Intrieri, a 1984 graduate of Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. "But when it's real money, with real consequences, you focus. You can't explain it away, saying, 'Oh, well. My model didn't work so well.'"

Penn State has formed a new, interdisciplinary research center to study the strength and security of the global financial system. The Center for the Study of Global Financial Stability seeks to build academic, government and industry partnerships to engage in joint research efforts that will develop a better understanding of the complexity of the global financial markets and help improve international financial stability. The main objective of the center is to contribute to the understanding of the global financial system and identify new approaches to use data to monitor the global financial system and enhance its stability, ultimately leading to improved financial regulation, better-informed policy decisions, and industry-led, market-driven stability initiatives. For more information, visit stability.psu.edu.

John Liechty, professor of marketing and statistics at the Penn State Smeal College of Business and director of the Center for the Study of Global Financial Stability, testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, on July 14 regarding oversight of the newly created federal Office of Financial Research (OFR). The OFR, which is Liechty's brainchild, was formed last year to begin collecting data on the financial system to allow the government to effectively monitor its stability and ward off potential threats.

Penn State Cooperative Extension, in conjunction with the Penn State Dickinson School of Law and Penn State's Department of Accounting, is sponsoring the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, from now through April 14 on the University Park campus.

The early bird doesn't always get the worm. Moreover, said a consumer-finance expert in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, being in a hurry to file your federal income tax forms in pursuit of a quick refund isn't always the best idea. Tax-filers eager to receive their federal income tax refund can use the services of commercial, for-profit tax preparers as early as December and thus get a jump on receiving their refunds. Robin Kuleck, consumer-finance educator and director of Penn State Cooperative Extension in Elk County, points out that using this method can have some drawbacks.

During a February 2009 conference on the financial crisis, Smeal College of Business professor John Liechty noticed that there was no federal oversight agency to collect data on the interconnectedness of the financial system in order to identify and respond to systemic risk. So he spent the next 18 months creating one. His long nights of research and frequent trips to Washington for meetings on Capitol Hill paid off when his idea -- the Office of Financial Research -- was signed into law by U.S. President Barack Obama as part of this summer's financial reform legislation.