3/1/2022 — As we return to a new normal post-pandemic, organizational and individual work arrangements will have to be designed to take into account that employees will range from not wanting to give up their autonomy of working from home to those who will want to come rushing back to the physical office. However, a large swath of the workforce will be somewhere in the middle. They would like to mix and match the benefits of working remotely and the advantages of coming to physical offices.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• strategy and entrepreneurship

2/1/2022 — How does sentiment in a pitch affect an entrepreneur’s fundraising outcomes? Although research suggests that negativity in entrepreneurial “pitches” to investors adversely impacts resource acquisition, there is a lack of empirical research showing whether, and to what extent, this is true. We study over 30,000 entrepreneurial loan requests from one of the largest loan marketplaces to understand how the sentiment in text-only pitches to investors affects fundraising. In contrast to prior literature, we find that negatively-worded pitches are funded faster than positively-worded ones.

• KEYWORD(S):
• entrepreneurial ecosystems
• strategy and entrepreneurship

1/14/2022 — Research and practice suggest that cofounded ventures outperform solo-founded ventures. Yet, little work has explored the conditions under which solo founding might be preferable to cofounding. Combining an inductive case-oriented analysis with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 70 new entrepreneurial ventures, we examine why and how solo founders can be as successful as their peers in cofounded ventures.

• KEYWORD(S):
• venture capital

9/28/2021 — Financial hardships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are hitting low-income families in North Carolina especially hard, according to a new report released by the North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA). The study was commissioned by NCCAA to gauge how the pandemic was affecting its efforts to combat poverty and facilitate self-sufficiency in low-income communities.

8/25/2021 — Seven powerful demographic trends—analogous to gale force wind gusts in an adverse weather event—constitute potentially powerful disruptors of business and commerce in the years ahead. Four of the gale force demographic disruptors—slowing total and foreign-born population growth, white population loss, and declining fertility— have evolved over the past several decades.

8/1/2021 — The North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA) commissioned a study to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its efforts to combat poverty and facilitate self-sufficiency in low-income communities throughout the state. We conducted focus groups with individuals served by Community Action Agencies (CAAs) and conducted a corresponding set of key informant interviews with identified leaders in five communities across the state. The research focused on five themes. We generated eight key takeaways from our content analysis of the focus group transcripts and nine key takeaways from our content analysis of the transcripts emanating from our Zoom sessions with community key informants.

7/1/2021 — For more than a year, researchers across the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC) Kenan-Flagler Business School (KFBS) and School of Medicine (SOM) worked with Sharecare, Inc. (Sharecare) to establish a framework for measuring the true value of corporate well-being interventions and develop a measurement tool to quantify their impact over time. The goal of the research was to assess the value of implementing corporate well-being interventions to improve employee health and lower direct medical costs to employers.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare

4/12/2021 — Economic theory holds that competition drives innovation, improves the quality of goods and services, and lowers prices for consumers. Health care delivery is no exception.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare

3/4/2021 — We measure the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of executives in a random sample of 523 US publicly traded companies and the S&P 500®. When we calibrate the RAEDs of executives as a whole against the RAEDs of the 2019 US population, we find that American Indians/Alaska Natives, Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented and Whites are overrepresented. However, when we calibrate executive RAEDs against a benchmark that seeks to take into account key features of the demand for and supply of proto-executive talent, namely the RAEDs of the cohorts of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the broad New York Times 2017 list of the top 100 US four-year colleges and universities, matched to executives’ BA/BS graduation years, mostly different and at times opposite findings obtain.

• KEYWORD(S):
• c-suite
• race

2/25/2021 — We propose and test a framework of private information acquisition and decision timing for asset allocators hiring outside investment managers. Using unique data on due diligence interactions between an institutional allocator and 860 hedge fund managers, we find that the production of private information complements public information. The allocator strategically chooses how much proprietary information to collect, reducing due diligence time by 18 months and improving outcomes. Selected funds outperform unselected funds by 9% over 20 months. The outperformance relates to the allocator learning about fund return-to-scale constraints and manager skill before other investors.

• KEYWORD(S):
• hedge funds

2/22/2021 — The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has brought into focus the limits on flexibility and innovation associated with market consolidation in care delivery. While anecdotes about the ossification in care delivery predominate, broader economic indicators point to the negative outcomes of consolidation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare

2/12/2021 — Despite advocacy from governmental officials and parents alike, we urge caution in the reopening of public schools before the coronavirus pandemic is fully under control. We are especially concerned about the premature re-opening of schools in impoverished and flood-prone urban and rural environments.

1/29/2021 — People of color are overrepresented relative to their shares of the total population in coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. The same is true for people living in over-crowded multigenerational households. Because people of color are more likely to live in multigenerational households than are Whites, the pandemic is having a double whammy effect in communities of color throughout the U.S.

1/28/2021 — There are bipartisan Medicare payment proposals that would reduce Medicare payments included in previous Obama and Trump budgets that could go a long way to filling the budget shortfall. While previous policy proposals either proposed new revenue sources or payment reductions, recent policies are pragmatic in nature and attempt to modify either beneficiary or provider behavior.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare

1/22/2021 — Considerable scholarly analysis and media attention has documented the racially disparate impact of coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Constituting 13 percent of the general population, Blacks reportedly account for 25 percent of those that have tested positive and 39 percent of the COVID-related deaths in the United States.

1/19/2021 — Background: Influenza imposes heavy societal costs through healthcare expenditures, missed days of work, and numerous hospitalizations each year. Considering these costs, the healthcare and behavioral science literature offers suggestions on increasing demand for flu vaccinations. And yet, the adult flu vaccination rate fluctuated between 37% and 46% between 2010 and 2019.Aim: Although a demand-side approach represents one viable strategy, an operations management approach would also highlight the need to consider a supply-side approach. In this paper, we investigate how to improve clinic vaccination rates by altering provider behavior.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare

1/18/2021 — We study the impact of widespread adoption of work-at-home technology using an equilibrium model where people choose where to live, how to allocate their time between working at home and at the office, and how much space to use in production. A key parameter is the elasticity of substitution between working at home and in the office that we estimate using cross-sectional time-use data.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• technology

1/8/2021 — We specify and estimate a time-varying Markov model of COVID-19 cases for the US in 2020. We find that the estimated level of undetected infections spiked in March and remained elevated through May. However, since late April estimated undetected infections have generally declined though it was not until June or July that detected cases exceeded the estimated number of undetected cases. 

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19

1/1/2021 — Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that the wealthier have better life and property insurance coverage.

• KEYWORD(S):
• insurance

12/30/2020 — We examine the impact of four classes of workplace interruptions on short-term (working hours) and long-term (across-shifts) worker performance in an agribusiness setting. The interruptions are organized in a two-by-two framework where they result (or do not result) in a physical task requirement and lead to a varying degree of attention shift from the primary task.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• organizational behavior
• strategy and entrepreneurship

12/28/2020 — Since 2001, the number of financial statement line items forecasted by analysts and managers that I/B/E/S and FactSet capture in their data feeds has soared. Using this new data, we find that 13 item surprises—11 income statement and 2 cash flow statement analyst and management guidance surprises—reliably explain firms’ signed earnings announcement returns.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• corporate finance
• finance
• financial reporting

12/12/2020 — This paper evaluates the pros and cons of including private equity fund investments in defined contribution plans. Potential benefits include higher returns and improved diversification as well as a relatively safe method for accessing investments previously only available to institutions and the very wealthy. Despite these enticing benefits, they need to be weighed against potential challenges and costs that may arise from creating this broader access to private funds.

• KEYWORD(S):
• private equity

12/10/2020 — Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are an important mechanism through which new technology is adopted by firms. We document patterns of labor reallocation and wage changes following M&As, consistent with the adoption of technology. Specifically, we show target establishments invest more in technology, become less routine task intensive, employ a greater share of high technology workers, and pay more unequal wages.

• KEYWORD(S):
• labor

12/8/2020 — The ways in which media news is slanted can shape beliefs about the economy, thereby affecting the decision to start a new business. Using exogenous variation in the introduction of Fox News Channel across US counties, I find that increased exposure to a pro-Republican slant during a Republican administration is positively associated with new firm creation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economic development
• strategy and entrepreneurship

11/30/2020 — Public opinion polls reveal Americans are turning to companies with purpose and ethics to lead us through the profound anxiety and crises we are currently experiencing as a nation. We developed a corporate reputational equity checklist that will enable firms to brand or rebrand themselves as inclusive and equitable places to work, as well as position their companies as a collective of civically engaged corporate citizens poised and willing to address society’s most pressing ills, including systemic racism.

• KEYWORD(S):
• diversity
• strategy and entrepreneurship

11/28/2020 — The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• technology

11/23/2020 — Speed is often critical for successful commercialization of a new technology, and patents help entrepreneurs secure funding, enter the market, and avoid expropriation of their ideas. In this article, we employ a recent change to U.S. patent law—the introduction of an elective program accelerating patent examination—to investigate the role of patent examination speed in strategic entrepreneurship.

• KEYWORD(S):
• commercialization
• innovation

11/16/2020 — Cities increasingly will have to demonstrate a strong commitment to reputational equity to remain attractive places to live, work, play, and do business given the racially and ethnically disparate impacts of Covid-19 pandemic and recent senseless killings of unarmed African Americans that spawned a nationwide protest movement. We leverage evidence-based best practices of inclusive and equitable development from the research literature to devise a reputational equity checklist—a portfolio of strategies, policies, tactics, procedures and practices cities will need to embrace to dismantle all forms of “Isms” and “Phobias” that are principally responsible for the major divisions that exist in American society today.

• KEYWORD(S):
• demographics
• diversity
• socioeconomics

11/5/2020 — Faced with demand uncertainty in a nascent industry, entrants often consider which customer segments to serve by tailoring the usage breadth and coherence of their product portfolios. Portfolios have high or low usage breadth, which is the extent to which they target customers in many segments, and high or low coherence, which measures how much the portfolios’ products overlap in targeted customer segments.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• technology

11/1/2020 — We examine the period over which banking authorities discussed, adopted, and implemented Basel III to understand whether, when, and how firms respond to proposed regulation. We find evidence to suggest that the affected banks not only lobbied rule makers against it, but these banks also made strategic financial reporting changes and altered their business models prior to rule makers finalizing the regulation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• economic development

10/27/2020 — As the nature of work has become more service-oriented, knowledge-intensive, and rapidly changing, people—be they workers or customers—have become more central to operational processes and have impacted operational outcomes in novel and perhaps more fundamental ways. Research in people-centric operations (PCO) studies how people affect the performance of operational processes. In this OM Forum, we define PCO as an area of study, offer a categorization scheme to take stock of where the field has allocated its attention to date, and offer our thoughts on promising directions for future research.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

10/25/2020 — The idea that new ventures are simple mimetic reflections of the organizational practices of existing organizations contradicts the recognized importance of organizational diversity for innovation. There is an inherent contradiction in the literature between the persistence implied by the inheritance of practices from prior employment, and the experimentation prevalent in the organizational practices contributed by new organizations. This paper first accounts for mechanisms that may drive heritage of practices from parent organizations to their spawns.

• KEYWORD(S):
• entrepreneurial ecosystems

10/19/2020 — We use detailed establishment-level data to understand whether and how the composition of the US stock market differs from the composition of US firms as a whole. Although the locational composition of employment in public firms is similar to that of all US firms, we find certain industries significantly overrepresented. Further, the gap between the industrial composition of publicly traded firms and all US firms has grown over the last thirty years.

• KEYWORD(S):
• investments

10/16/2020 — With the upcoming November election and calls by President Trump for 1 or more vaccines for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to be ready before the end of the year, if not by the election, many have started to wonder whether the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can withstand this type of political pressure.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare

10/7/2020 — We find that equity loan fees are the best predictor of cross-sectional returns. When compared to 102 other anomalies, the loan fee anomaly has the highest monthly long-short return (1.17%), has the highest monthly Sharpe Ratio (0.40), and unlike other anomalies, exhibits strong persistence throughout the sample.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship

10/1/2020 — This paper characterizes the implications of risk-on/risk-off shocks for emerging market capital flows and returns. We document that these shocks have important implications not only for the median of emerging markets flows and returns but also for the left tail.

• KEYWORD(S):
• private equity
• strategy and entrepreneurship

9/29/2020 — In a recent episode of his award-winning show, “United Shades of America,” W. Kamau Bell interviews a Black man about systemic racism in America who said, “This country is not designed for us and, in fact, is designed against us.” As an African American, this observation triggered three critical questions.

9/21/2020 — We examine the impact of logistics performance metrics such as delivery time, and customer’s requested delivery speed on logistics service ratings and third-party sellers’ sales on an e-commerce platform.

• KEYWORD(S):
• retail
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• technology

9/16/2020 — We comment on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed Reporting Threshold for Institutional Investment Managers (“Proposal”). We estimate the cost savings from the Proposal are economically small, and amount to 0.004% (0.008%) of assets under management for the average (median) affected filer, and 0.02% of assets for the smallest filer. This small cost savings needs to be weighed against the potentially large costs to investors and others created by eliminating a public disclosure that they heavily use.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing
• private equity

9/10/2020 — Knowledge of our changing demography can serve as both foundation and frame for how to achieve greater social, economic, environmental, and health equity in North Carolina. After describing how disruptive demographics are transforming the our state, this essay highlights a set of equity issues undergirding our shifting demography and concludes with a set of tools and strategies to make North Carolina a place where equity, inclusion, and belonging is the new normal.

• KEYWORD(S):
• disruptive demographics
• inclusive development
• north carolina

9/1/2020 — This report catalogs work by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, in conjunction with the North Carolina CEO Leadership Forum, to distill insights from top academic researchers, business leaders and policy experts on how the economy is changing and what this means for the future of North Carolina. We describe seven forces currently reshaping the U.S. (and in some cases, global) economy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• economic outlook
• finance
• global business

9/1/2020 — In May 2020, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise established the North Carolina CEO Leadership Forum to provide private sector leaders with a venue to comment on the opportunities and challenges facing the North Carolina economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic has distorted business activity in the short term, it has also created new long-term growth opportunities for North Carolina. Next week, the Kenan Institute and the forum will publish the research white paper Seven Forces Reshaping the Economy. The full paper details seven major economic and business trends, or forces, the COVID-19 pandemic has produced that will permanently alter both the U.S. and North Carolina economies. This summary outlines those forces, the opportunities available to North Carolina and policy recommendations the state should consider to capitalize on a rapidly changing economy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• economic outlook
• global business
• strategy and entrepreneurship

9/1/2020 — This report catalogs work by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, in conjunction with the North Carolina CEO Leadership Forum, to distill insights from top academic researchers, business leaders and policy experts on how the economy is changing and what this means for the future of North Carolina. We describe seven forces currently reshaping the U.S. (and in some cases, global) economy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• economic outlook
• global business
• north carolina
• strategy and entrepreneurship

8/19/2020 — This is the first part of a two-part post discussing the current state of health reform and where we should go from here. Part I examines the effects of the ACA and progressive reform initiatives. Part II will outline a market-driven path forward.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare

8/18/2020 — History informs us that some people, especially the wealthy, typically flee cities in responseto pandemics and other major catastrophes.  Media accounts and preliminary empiricalresearch suggest that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Nearly a halfmillion people reportedly fled hard-hit New York City within two months of the World HealthOrganization declaring the coronavirus disease a global pandemic.Some coronavirus pandemic refugees headed to nearby suburbs, others headed to second homes and vacation spots in other states, and still others moved back home to live with parents.

• KEYWORD(S):
• future of work
• migration

8/18/2020 — Immigrants are once again the targets of draconian policymaking. It is during the COVID-19 pandemic this time. Through a series of presidential proclamations and other executive branch maneuvers, the Trump Administration is attempting to leverage a host of so-called migration management tools to ban entry and force some immigrant to leave the country—all under the guise of containing the spread of the coronavirus and protecting American jobs.

• KEYWORD(S):
• immigration
• inclusion
• migration

8/18/2020 — The COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide civil unrest spawned by the recent spate of senseless killings of unarmed African Americans have illuminated what executive development professionals have been telling private and public sector leaders and managers for quite some time. We are living in an era of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity—a VUCA World. “Certain-uncertainty” is the new normal in today’s society and economy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• inclusive development

8/15/2020 — Despite extensive empirical evidence of the economic and financial benefits of green buildings, energy retrofit investments in existing buildings have not reached widespread adoption.This paper empirically estimate returns to energy retrofit investments for multifamily and commercial buildings in New York City, using a novel database of actual audit report recommendations and permitted renovation work extracted using natural language processing.

• KEYWORD(S):
• energy

8/1/2020 — In December 2019, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Center for the Business of Health (CBOH) began a research partnership with Sharecare, a leading digital health company founded by technology entrepreneur, Jeff Arnold, to assess the economic value of changing various health behaviors via mobile health (mHealth) interventions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare
• patient

7/31/2020 — The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 exemplifies a worst-case scenario for federal, state, and local disaster preparedness planning and illustrates some of the United States’ fundamental public health infrastructure flaws. While stay-at-home orders and economic shutdowns initially depressed disease spread, they harmed businesses and organizations, threatened individuals’ livelihoods, and negatively impacted community well-being. National standards for COVID-19 management tools and protocols were not available when needed, and state, local, and federal guidance differed, and often conflicted, in ways that confused the public and created economic uncertainty.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare