11/27/2023 — Effective policymakers must balance the demands of formulating a corporate tax system that spurs economic activity while promoting a “level playing field” across firms. However, tax systems have become more complex over time, increasing firms’ difficulty in understanding and complying with tax regulations. We explore the role of corporate tax system complexity in both objectives, using an international sample and measuring tax system complexity based on the average time firms spend to comply with the country’s tax regulations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

11/27/2023 — This paper defines risk-on risk-off (RORO), an elusive terminology in pervasive use, as the variation in global investor risk aversion. Our high-frequency RORO index captures time-varying investor risk appetite across multiple dimensions: advanced economy credit risk, equity market volatility, funding conditions, and currency dynamics. The index exhibits risk-off skewness and pronounced fat tails, suggesting its amplifying potential for extreme, destabilizing events. Compared with the conventional VIX measure, the RORO index reflects the multifaceted nature of risk, underscoring the diverse provenance of investor risk sentiment. Practical applications of the RORO index highlight its significance for international portfolio reallocation and return predictability.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• finance
• global business

11/27/2023 — Banks face corporate and regulatory governance pressures. A critical tool of regulatory governance is direct monitoring by bank supervisors. Supervisors assess banks using a multi-dimensional rating scheme, including a rating of top management teams (M-rating). We examine implications of M-ratings from the distinct, but complementary perspectives of managerial capital and managerial discipline.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

11/16/2023 — Effective policymakers must balance the demands of formulating a corporate tax system that spurs economic activity while promoting a “level playing field” across firms. However, tax systems have become more complex over time, increasing firms’ difficulty in understanding and complying with tax regulations. We explore the role of corporate tax system complexity in both objectives, using an international sample and measuring tax system complexity based on the average time firms spend to comply with the country’s tax regulations. Examining both capital and labor investment, we document two key findings. First, firm-level investment is less sensitive to changes in corporate income tax rates when tax system complexity is higher, suggesting that such complexity can undermine the ability of tax policy to stimulate investment. Second, the impact of complexity on the sensitivity of investment to the tax rate varies significantly across firms, with domestic-owned, smaller, and private firms being more negatively affected by tax system complexity.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• federal tax
• international tax

11/16/2023 — We examine how tax-induced organizational complexity (“TIOC”), which we define as the organizational complexity that would not exist in a zero-tax world, is associated with executive performance measurement. While these structures can facilitate lower tax burdens, firms need to design their performance measurement systems to encourage executives to manage the associated complexity to avoid potential negative consequences.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

11/15/2023 — In 2022, in-migration slowed, and out-migration accelerated, reducing the role of net migration in North Carolina statewide population growth, according to recently released Census data. For the Tarheel state, we document changes in gross and net migration flows between 2021 and 2022, highlight possible drivers, and offer anecdotal evidence as to why the revealed changes may foreshadow a longer- term shift in migration’s role in statewide population change.

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• disruptive demographics
• economic outlook
• migration
• north carolina

11/14/2023 — This paper explores the ups and downs of innovation and productivity growth in the US economy and potential connections to the ups and downs of business dynamism and entrepreneurship over the last few decades.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• technology
• workforce disrupted

11/14/2023 — This work examines the effects on worker psychological well-being and productivity of highly publicized negative identity-related societal events, such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd, mass shootings like the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting that targeted LGBTQ+ individuals, and the 2021 Atlanta area Spa shootings that targeted individuals of Asian descent.

• KEYWORD(S):
• DEI
• workforce disrupted

11/14/2023 — The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) tools necessitates the development of human skills that allow workers to use these new technologies to create value that AI tools cannot on their own.

• KEYWORD(S):
• ai
• technology
• workforce disrupted

11/14/2023 — Pay transparency policies are increasingly popular among governments in the United States and around the world.

• KEYWORD(S):
• DEI
• gender
• inequality
• workforce disrupted

11/14/2023 — COVID-19 exacerbated existing shortages in the labor market, causing business leaders to revise corporate strategies designed to recruit and retain the workforce needed to compete in at the state, national, and global level. We must recognize and support the critical role our community colleges serve in meeting employers’ post-pandemic workforce demands if we are to close the skills gap in the current labor market.

• KEYWORD(S):
• higher education
• north carolina
• workforce disrupted

11/14/2023 — Immigration is one of the most contentious policy issues, and Congress has for decades failed to make any significant legislative progress. The result is an incoherent policy landscape and serious operational challenges on the ground. At the same time, immigration and immigrant integration are critical to U.S. workforce growth, government fiscal solvency, and innovation. I discuss key findings from the economics literature and their implications for where to focus immigration reform efforts.

• KEYWORD(S):
• immigration
• workforce disrupted

11/1/2023 — Prior research suggests that female negotiators often obtain worse outcomes than male negotiators. The current research examines whether this pattern extends to the large subset of men and women who identify as gays and lesbians. In particular, we interweave scholarship on gender stereotypes with work on intersectionality and MOSAIC theory to develop a theoretical model that anticipates how male and female negotiators will be treated at the bargaining table based on whether they are perceived to be heterosexual or homosexual. This model predicts that homosexual women, like heterosexual men, will receive more beneficial negotiation offers and outcomes than heterosexual women and homosexual men.

• KEYWORD(S):
• bias
• gender
• organizational behavior

11/1/2023 — Quantum computers are not yet up to the task of providing computational advantages for practical stochastic diffusion models commonly used by financial analysts. In this paper we introduce a class of stochastic processes that are both realistic in terms of mimicking financial market risks as well as more amenable to potential quantum computational advantages.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• finance
• quantum computing

10/21/2023 — Customer review manipulation is a common strategy employed by sellers of online marketplaces to combat competitors. The impact of this deceptive behavior on the competitive pricing of online marketplaces is intricate. First, buying fake reviews incurs additional costs and alters customer demand in competitive settings by misrepresenting product information. Second, the pricing is determined through internal competitions, where sellers compete with each other within an online marketplace. This is because the winner's price is the default price displayed to customers, representing the price of the online marketplace. Meanwhile, online marketplaces also effectively manage prices in order to stay competitive in external competition against multi-channel retailers, further complicating this problem. To unravel this influence mechanism, we build instrumented econometric models and develop a game-theoretic model to empirically and theoretically analyze this influence mechanism in the context of internal and external competitions, respectively.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

10/18/2023 — We examine how tax-induced organizational complexity (“TIOC”), which we define as the organizational complexity that would not exist in a zero-tax world, is associated with executive performance measurement. While these structures can facilitate lower tax burdens, firms need to design their performance measurement systems to encourage executives to manage the associated complexity to avoid potential negative consequences. Using firms’ subsidiary structures in tax havens and other low tax countries to measure TIOC, we document several main findings.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• international tax

10/4/2023 — We describe an experimental curriculum innovation that creates a safe space for students to engage in courageous conversations—to openly share diverse thoughts and opinions as well as vigorously debate politically charged issues of critical business importance.

• KEYWORD(S):
• business education
• higher education

10/4/2023 — Prior research suggests that female negotiators often obtain worse outcomes than male negotiators. The current research examines whether this pattern extends to the large subset of men and women who identify as gays and lesbians. In particular, we interweave scholarship on gender stereotypes with work on intersectionality and MOSAIC theory to develop a theoretical model that anticipates how male and female negotiators will be treated at the bargaining table based on whether they are perceived to be heterosexual or homosexual.

• KEYWORD(S):
• bias
• gender
• organizational behavior

10/1/2023 — In the sales process in business markets, customers often are assisted by two types of sales reps: customer-focused reps (CSRs) and operations-focused reps (OSRs), who work together to ensure smooth buying experiences. Because these reps work jointly, selling firms often evaluate reps’ performance according to overall output, without assessing or quantifying their respective individual contributions to customer buying decisions. The authors of this study propose using value-added metrics that pertain to three drivers of value: (1) CSRs, (2) OSRs, and (3) the interface between CSRs and OSRs. This approach leverages variations in CSR–OSR combinations and produces both individual CSR–OSR and dyadic or interface value-added metrics. To address the empirical challenges (i.e., limited variations in CSR–OSR combinations), they use empirical Bayes random effect estimation to produce best linear unbiased prediction.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

9/27/2023 — Firms' payout decisions respond to expected returns: everything else equal, firms invest less and pay out more when their cost of capital increases. Given investors' demand for firm payout, market clearing implies that the dynamics of productivity and payout demand fully determine equilibrium asset prices and returns. We use this logic to propose a payout-based asset pricing framework and we illustrate the analogy between our approach and consumption-based asset pricing in a simple two-period model. Then, we introduce a quantitative payout-based asset pricing model and calibrate the productivity and payout demand processes to match aggregate U.S. corporate output and payout empirical moments. We find that model-implied payout yields and firm returns go a long way in reproducing key attributes of their empirical counterparts.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

9/20/2023 — We study the performance and information acquisition behavior of mutual funds for both their long and short positions. We show that managers acquire relatively more information about their shorts because the benefit of acquiring information about shorts is larger.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

9/15/2023 — In contrast to the equivocal findings in academic research, “the business case for diversity” is the dominant rhetorical paradigm for how U.S. corporations debate actions and policies around racial/ethnic diversity. In this paper, we conduct an empirical test of the paradigm by gathering data on the race/ethnicity of the individuals shown on the leadership pages of S&P 500 firms’ websites as of mid-2011, 2014, 2017, 2020 and 2021, and then determining if any of nine measures of the racial/ethnic diversity of these executives reliably predict cross-sectional variation in any of six measures of their firms’ financial performance over the next fiscal year. We do not find reliable evidence that they do.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• race
• strategy and entrepreneurship

9/13/2023 — This paper uses transaction-level import data at the shipment level to examine how multinational companies importing to the US have restructured their supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that companies sourced from fewer locations, reduced the share of imports from China, and increased the share of imports from other Asian countries, such as India and Vietnam, and North American countries, such as Canada and Mexico. For managers, our results imply that a one-size-fits-all mentality regarding supply chain disruption responses is not appropriate, and companies’ disruption-response strategies need to be tailored to individual supply chains’ circumstances.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

9/11/2023 — North Carolina’s phenomenal migration-driven population growth masks a troubling trend: high rates of death and dying prematurely which, left unchecked, can potentially derail the state’s economic growth and prosperity in the years ahead. On average, 246 North Carolinians died each day during the 2010s, increasing to 317 daily between April 1, 2020 and July 1, 2022. COVID-19 and the substance abuse crisis have played a major role in premature deaths of prime working age citizens of the state. Both people-based and place-based strategies and interventions are urgently needed to address the state’s death crisis.

• KEYWORD(S):
• disruptive demographics
• economic development policy
• strategy and entrepreneurship

9/8/2023 — This paper surveys the recent advances in machine learning method for economic forecasting. The survey covers the following topics: nowcasting, textual data, panel and tensor data, high-dimensional Granger causality tests, time series cross-validation, classification with economic losses.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• finance
• machine learning

9/8/2023 — Prior work on supervisor bottom-line mentality (SBLM) has suggested it represents a static, unbending focus, with supervisors so focused on the bottom line that they discount ethical considerations. We propose that SBLM varies, within-person, given various factors in a supervisor's work life that pull and push their attention to and away from the bottom line across their workweeks. We theorize that the varying nature of SBLM elicits anxiety in employees that is exhausting because, on the days supervisors give greater emphasis to the bottom line, employees must abandon the comfort of their routines to produce bottom-line results. Ultimately, this experience motivates employee unethical behavior (i.e., coworker undermining). We also predict that, by providing employees support and guidance, supervisors’ steadfast commitment to ethics (i.e., between-person ethical leadership perceptions) influences the degree to which exhausted employees undermine their coworkers.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

9/1/2023 — General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we show that these portfolio considerations are important for understanding fund-level private equity returns.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• private equity

8/12/2023 — This paper presents the development, validation, and implementation of a data-driven optimization model designed to dynamically plan the assignment of anesthesiologists across multiple hospital locations within a large multi-specialty healthcare system. We formulate the problem as a multi-stage robust mixed-integer program incorporating on-call flexibility to address demand uncertainty. The optimized dynamic staffing plan has been successfully implemented in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center healthcare system, leading to estimated annual cost savings of 12\% compared to current practice, or about \$800,000 annually.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

7/31/2023 — Health care costs in the United States make up a larger proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than in any other developed country and continue to rise. We examine whether the use of consistent metrics in costing information systems across hospitals provides one avenue to reduce these costs. We refer to such consistency as “costing information consistency” or CIC and empirically measure it by identifying whether hospitals in a multihospital system share the same costing system vendor. Using M&A activity among vendors as an instrument for exogenous changes in hospital CIC, we find that CIC is associated with a 13.3% reduction in operating expenses, suggesting that increased cost comparability from CIC helps hospitals identify ways to reduce operating expenses by identifying clinical and administrative best practices.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

7/26/2023 — The 2022 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises”. This article surveys the contributions of the three laureates and discusses how their insights have changed the way that academics and policymakers understand banks and their roles in financial crises.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

7/21/2023 — We examine the intersection of two major trends at online retail platforms: the emergence of retail media, which allows sellers to advertise on retail platforms alongside selling their products, and the platforms' switch away from reselling towards marketplace formats. We study whether and when a retail platform benefits from introducing sponsored advertising, and how the effects change with the platform's selling format. We consider two sellers with different qualities selling through a retail platform. We find that counter to our intuitions, offering sponsored advertising may not always benefit the platform, depending on its selling format.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

7/17/2023 — Policies that require, or recommend, disclosure of corporate tax information are becoming more common throughout the world, as are examples of tax-related information increasingly influencing public policy and perceptions. In addition, companies are increasing the voluntary provision of tax-related information. We describe those trends and place them within a taxonomy of public and private tax disclosure. We then review the academic literature on corporate tax disclosures and discuss what is known about their effects.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

7/12/2023 — We review the accounting literature on innovation, focusing on the attributes of innovation that collectively make it unique from other resources: novelty, nonrivalry, and partial excludability. These unique attributes help innovation drive economic growth but create information-based challenges that accounting researchers are well-suited to address. We discuss the definition and measurement of innovation, then review the accounting literatures on the disclosure, management, financial reporting, taxation, and contracting and financing of innovation. For each of these literatures we identify challenges and opportunities for future research.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• innovation

7/12/2023 — Co-brands are strategically advantageous partnerships which can also involve risk. For example, Papa John’s gained access to the largest television audience in the US by sponsoring the National Football League (NFL), but later blamed stagnant sales on how the NFL’s handled players’ well-publicized protests of inequitable policing. What implications did Papa John’s prioritization of sales over fairness have for NFL consumption? To answer this question, the current research tests for changes in Sunday watch party rituals (SWPR), when U.S. consumers gather to socialize while watching live NFL games.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

6/27/2023 — Punishments are not always administered immediately after a crime is committed. Although scholars and researchers claim that third parties should normatively enact punishments proportionate to a given crime, we contend that third parties punish transgressors more severely when there is a time delay between a transgressor’s crime and when they face punishment for it. We theorize that this occurs because of a perception of unfairness, whereby third parties view the process that led to time delays as unfair.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

6/26/2023 — When a business model innovation (BMI) appears, incumbent firms experience great uncertainty about its potential ramifications and their capacity to assimilate the new business model. To resolve such uncertainty, incumbents seek to learn from industry peers, which can spark organizational herding. Organizational herding in BMI contexts is distinct, relative to product/technology adoption contexts, because in addition to peer behaviors, incumbents actively attempt to evaluate peer outcomes, and the importance of peer behaviors and outcomes likely vary, both over time and across types of peers.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• marketing

6/23/2023 — It is common wisdom that practice makes perfect. And, in fact, we find evidence that when given a choice between practicing a task and reflecting on their previously accumulated practice, most people opt for the former. We argue in this paper that this preference is misinformed. Using evidence gathered in ten experimental studies (N = 4,340) conducted across different environments, geographies, and populations, we provide a rich understanding of the conditions under which the marginal benefit of reflecting on previously accumulated experience is superior to the marginal benefit of accumulating additional experience.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

6/22/2023 — Although the level of power held by the marketing department can determine key organizational outcomes, including firm performance, we show that this power has been decreasing since 2007. To address this apparent disconnect, we propose that the board of directors is a critical but overlooked antecedent of marketing department power. In particular, we demonstrate that directors’ exposure through board service at other firms (i.e., board-interlocked firms) affects the marketing department’s power in the firms on whose boards they also serve (i.e., focal firms).

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

6/18/2023 — We investigate the role of information dissemination about cyberattacks through major newswires on municipal finance. Employing a difference-in-differences approach to identify causal effects, we find that county-level cyberattacks covered by the media cause increases in new offer yields and reduce bond issuance.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

6/4/2023 — In business markets, marketing and sales functions often conflict over customer acquisition. Marketers are seen to complain that sales representatives disregard the leads they generate, while sales representatives question the revenue potential of these leads. How should firms resolve such conflicts? We investigate these questions using relatively novel sequential principal-agent models with risk averse agents where asymmetry of information exists regarding leads’ revenue potentials.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

6/4/2023 — We examine the consequences of corporate tax enforcement for business activity. Employing two different empirical approaches—a regional design and a firm-level design—we document that corporate tax enforcement is negatively associated with business activity. This association is economically significant and is robust to tests that mitigate concerns regarding endogeneity and measurement.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

6/4/2023 — Lack of co-movement between consumption growth differentials and real exchange rates is a traditional indicator of a disconnect of foreign exchange markets from economic fundamentals (Backus-Smith 1993 anomaly). We present novel evidence for the (dis)connect between the volatilities, as opposed to the levels, of these variables. The volatility correlations are below one, but they are larger than the level correlations. In the cross-section of countries, the volatility disconnect weakens for countries with low amount of expected growth risk and high amount of volatility risk. We provide an explanation of our empirical findings based on international risk-sharing of both expected growth and volatility news shocks.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

6/4/2023 — About 27% of diabetics also suffer from depression, and the presence of co-morbid depression could increase the cost of care for diabetes by up to 100%. Several randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that physical and mental health are more likely to improve for diabetes patients suffering from depression when regular treatment for depression is provided in a primary care setting (called Collaborative Care). An important operational lever in managing Collaborative Care is the allocation of the care manager's time to enrolled patients based on their requirements, which in turn influences the revenue, costs, and patient health outcomes. We present a mathematical modeling approach that determines the optimal allocation of care manager's time and quantifies the costs and benefits of Collaborative Care.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

6/1/2023 — Throughout 2022, the Kenan Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill explored how ESG factors enter into and play a role in the decisions of corporate managers and investors. We have framed this analysis within the broader notion of “stakeholder capitalism,” a model in which business decisions reflect explicit consideration of their expected impact on a broader set of corporate stakeholders.

• KEYWORD(S):
• esg
• finance
• stakeholder capitalism

6/1/2023 — Multicultural experiences – such as living, traveling, or working abroad – can have many psychological benefits, including decreasing intergroup bias. However, unlike the intergroup contact literature, research on multicultural experiences has yet to examine whether the valence of these experiences may moderate such outcomes. So, could multicultural experiences actually increase intergroup bias? Five studies reveal that multicultural experiences increase (rather than decrease) intergroup bias when those experiences are negative (rather than positive).

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

5/25/2023 — Companies face increasing pressure from different stakeholders to address various environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. In their efforts to engage with these issues, they might pursue symbolic or substantive actions, either pre-emptively (proactive actions) or in response to specific targeted threats (reactive actions). Yet we know relatively little about how different stakeholders react to this repertoire of corporate actions and importantly, whether they are aligned in their reaction. We ask this question in the context of gender inequality, an issue that has become salient due to heightened societal attention thanks to the #MeToo movement.

• KEYWORD(S):
• esg
• gender
• inequality
• strategy and entrepreneurship

5/17/2023 — The executive labor market (ELM) is a topic of interest that spans several academic fields. The outcomes of the ELM, including executive selection, succession, and compensation, are important considerations as they influence executive decision making and other organizational outcomes. Yet, a comprehensive framework of ELM dynamics currently does not exist. To address this shortcoming, we reviewed the existing literature using five fundamental questions: (1) What executive jobs are available? (2) Who is available to fill executive jobs, and what is valued on the ELM? (3) Who signals interest in the executive jobs? (4) Who gets offered/accepts the executive job, and what is the agreed-upon compensation? (5) How do status and social capital influence ELM outcomes? By answering these questions, our review provides a framework for integrating existing research on the ELM while suggesting avenues for future research.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship

5/13/2023 — This study examines the spillover effect of environmental enforcement through private lending networks. Financial lending institutions face growing public and regulatory pressures to manage and reduce environmental risks relating to their lending activities and therefore are motivated to monitor corporate borrowers’ environmental practices.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• climate change
• corporate social responsibility

5/12/2023 — The rapid growth in the adoption of mobile payments has already begun to reshape bank payment practices. Utilizing a unique data set from a leading bank in Asia, which records credit card transactions of its customers before and after the launch of Alipay mobile payment, the largest mobile payment platform in the world, this study aims to understand the impact of mobile payment adoption on bank customer credit card activities and the change of this impact after the mobile payment expansion. To do so, we employ the difference-in-differences (DID) method coupled with matching to estimate the effects. We find that mobile payment adoption not only increases customer credit card activities at the focal bank through both offline and online channels but also enhances customer loyalty to the bank by reducing churn.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

5/5/2023 — We hypothesize that after a relaxation of short selling constraints, an escalation in short selling activity will heighten incentives for short sellers to accelerate price discovery by revealing their negative information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the overall sentiment of media coverage tilts significantly more negative for pilot relative to control firms following exogenous relief of short sale constraints.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting