Research
Survey of Impact of COVID-19 on Small Businesses
The Small Business Investor Alliance surveyed the small business portfolios of Small Business Investment Companies to measure the impact the pandemic is having on their operations and employment. Small businesses are facing extreme cash flow concerns. Small businesses are already laying off a substantial number of employees and without a significant change in trajectory, layoffs are anticipated to increase tremendously. Data analysis provided by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
MoreDistinguishing Voice and Silence at Work: Unique Relationships with Perceived Impact, Psychological Safety, and Burnout
Scholars continue to debate whether voice and silence are opposites or distinct constructs. This ambiguity has prevented meaningful theoretical advancements about employees’ voice and silence at work. We draw on the behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition systems perspective to provide a conceptual framework for the independence of voice and silence and explicate how two key antecedents—perceived impact and psychological safety—more strongly relate to voice and silence, respectively. We further differentiate voice and silence by identifying their unique effects on employee burnout.
MoreHave Private Equity Returns Really Declined?
In a recent paper, “Demystifying Illiquid Assets – Expected Returns for Private Equity,” Ilmanen, Chandra and McQuinn (of AQR) give a perspective on the past, present, and expected future performance of private equity. They conclude that “private equity does not seem to offer as attractive a net-of-fee return edge over public market counterparts as it did 15-20 years ago from either a historical or forward-looking perspective.” This analysis provides our perspective based on more recent and, we think, more reliable data and performance measures – the historical perspective is more positive than Ilmanen et al. portray. More
Survey of Impact of COVID-19 on Small Businesses
The Small Business Investor Alliance surveyed the small business portfolios of Small Business Investment Companies to measure the impact the pandemic is having on their operations and employment. Small businesses are facing extreme cash flow concerns. Small businesses are already laying off a substantial number of employees and without a significant change in trajectory, layoffs are anticipated to increase tremendously. Data analysis provided by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
MorePrice Transparency: Empowering Patient Choice and Promoting Provider Competition
Combining the perspectives of practicing physicians, organized medicine, and competition policy, the writers review the challenges and benefits of price transparency, including the recent executive order and associated rulemaking directing providers to disclose negotiated and out-of-pocket costs for “shoppable” healthcare services. More
What Determines Where Opportunity Knocks? Political Affiliation in the Selection of Opportunity Zones
We examine the role of political affiliation during the selection of Opportunity Zones, a place-based tax incentive enacted by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. We find governors are on average 7.6% more likely to select a census tract as an Opportunity Zone when the tract’s state representative is a member of the governor’s political party. Further, we find that this effect ranges from 0.0% to 26.4% based on the state-level processes governors used to select Opportunity Zones, such as engagement of professional advisors and implementation of public comment procedures.
MoreDistinguishing Voice and Silence at Work: Unique Relationships with Perceived Impact, Psychological Safety, and Burnout
Scholars continue to debate whether voice and silence are opposites or distinct constructs. This ambiguity has prevented meaningful theoretical advancements about employees’ voice and silence at work. We draw on the behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition systems perspective to provide a conceptual framework for the independence of voice and silence and explicate how two key antecedents—perceived impact and psychological safety—more strongly relate to voice and silence, respectively. We further differentiate voice and silence by identifying their unique effects on employee burnout.
MoreFilling the U.S. Small Business Funding Gap
Despite having the deepest and most diverse capital markets in the world, the United States still struggles to provide sufficient capital to many small businesses outside of major commercial centers as well as to women-owned and minority-owned businesses regardless of size or location. This paper reviews the academic literature and provides an analysis of some recent data to gain understanding of the causes of these gaps as well as the solutions for filling the gaps. Results indicate that the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program is an effective mechanism for providing capital to underserved geographies as well as to businesses owned by women and underrepresented minorities. More
The Liquidity, Precision, and Comparability Effects of the Adoption of ASC 606: Revenue from Contracts with Customers
I examine the liquidity effect of the adoption of ASC 606: Revenue from contracts with customers. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, I find that the adoption of ASC 606 increases liquidity. Next, I examine the channels through which the adoption of the standard affects liquidity.
MoreDo Larger Audiences Generate Greater Revenues under Pay What You Want? Evidence from a Live Streaming Platform
As live streaming of events (e.g., video games, political commentary, and makeup tutorials, among others) gains traction, pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing strategies are emerging as critical monetization tools. In this research, we assess the viability and efficacy of PWYW by examining the relationship between popularity (i.e., audience size) of a live streaming event and the revenue it generates under a PWYW scheme.
MoreNowcasting Net Asset Values: The Case of Private Equity
We apply advances in analysis of mix frequency and sparse data to estimate "unsmoothed'' private equity (PE) Net Asset Values (NAVs) at the weekly frequency for individual funds. Using simulations and a large sample of buyout and venture funds, we show that our method yields superior estimates of fund asset values than a simple approach based on comparable public asset and as-reported NAVs.
MoreDoes Chief Investment Officer Pay Reflect Performance? Evidence from Non-profits
This paper provides the first study of compensation and pay-for-performance for top executives at non-profit endowments. Using a detailed breakdown of compensation from IRS filings over the 2009-2017 period, we find that pay packages of Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) depend more heavily on bonuses than do those for other non-profit executives.
MoreEstimation and HAC-based Inference for Machine Learning Time Series Regressions
Time series regression analysis in econometrics typically involves a framework relying on a set of mixing conditions to establish consistency and asymptotic normality of parameter estimates and HAC-type estimators of the residual long-run variances to conduct proper inference. This article introduces structured machine learning regressions for high-dimensional time series data using the aforementioned commonly used setting.
More