Employee spinouts, startups founded by prior employees of existing industry firms, play a critical role in firm creation and knowledge transfer within and across industries. Their superior performance often arises from resources and knowledge accrued during employment in parent firms. An understudied question relates to whether prior employment in parent firms impacts an employee spinout’s alliance formation, given that alliances are critical to the survival and commercial success of startups. This article examines when employee spinout’s alliance partners overlap with their parent’s partners. Drawing on alliance formation patterns of U.S. medical device spinouts founded between 1990 to 2013, we find that spinouts extending their parents’ technologies tend to have more alliance partner overlap with their parents, whereas product market overlap leads to fewer overlapping partners.
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.
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.
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, and that the wealthier have better life and property insurance coverage. Wealth-related differences in background risk, legal risk, liquidity constraints, financial literacy, and pricing explain only a small
fraction of the positive wealth-insurance correlation.
Using U.S. tax-return data containing the universe of individual taxable stock sales from 2008 to 2009, we examine which individuals increased their sale of stocks following episodes of market tumult. We find that the increase was disproportionately concentrated among investors in the top 1 and top 0.1% of the overall income distribution, retired individuals, and individuals at the very top of the dividend income distribution. Our estimates suggest that, following the day when Lehman Brothers collapsed, taxpayers in the top 0.1% sold $1.7 billion more in stocks than individuals in the bottom 75%. This difference is equal to 89% of average daily sales by taxpayers in the top 0.1%.
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.
We measure and calibrate the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of executives in US public companies. We show that the magnitudes of underrepresentation for Blacks and Hispanics and overrepresentation for Whites are 10+ times larger when executive RAEDS are calibrated against the US population than when calibrated against an economic benchmark that reflects the demand for and supply of proto-executive talent. We conclude that at least 90% of the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic executives in US public companies comes from factors in effect before US public companies hire proto-executive talent rather than actions taken by companies after such talent is hired.
We keep hearing that the corporate tax code is riddled with “loopholes” and that large corporations are tax cheats for using them and not paying their “fair share.” Is it true? No, most large corporations pay the amount in taxes they do because Congress expressly wrote the tax code to allow them to pay that amount.
The more significant revenue loss, however, is from exceptions to the tax code. When it comes to lost corporate tax revenue, exceptions are the rule, and not following the rules is the exception.
In a series of influential studies, McKinsey (2015, 2018, 2020) report a statistically significant positive relation between the industry-adjusted EBIT margin of global samples of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using recent data for US S&P 500® firms, we find statistically insignificant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity and not only industry-adjusted EBIT margin, but also industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, ROA, ROE, and TSR. Our results suggest that despite the imprimatur often given to McKinsey’s (2015, 2018, 2020) studies, caution is warranted in relying on their findings to support the view that US publicly traded firms can deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.
Corporations are able to deduct some strange things on their tax returns. But new tax proposals from President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduce a few doozies.
Sound crazy? We think it does. But because Biden and Warren want to place a tax on financial accounting income (the income that companies report to investors), everything that is allowed as an expense for financial accounting purposes would become a proper deduction under the new proposed taxes.And that includes a lot of things.
Question Is a crowdsourcing open call a feasible approach to engaging the university community in COVID-19 safety strategies?
Findings This qualitative study evaluated 82 submissions to a university open call for creative solutions from students, faculty, and staff to inform safety in the fall 2020 semester. Solutions were shared with university leadership, and several are being further developed.
Meaning The results of this study suggest that open calls are a promising approach to understanding university community members’ concerns and identifying stakeholder-driven, innovative solutions for safe university activity during the pandemic.
Are the agglomeration economies of technology hubs augmented by a localized market for start-ups – acquisitions, and IPOs? How does this affect the ability of places outside of those hubs to foster digital startups as a tool of local economic development? We study this with a particular focus on acquisitions by the seven largest American digital platforms – Amazon, Alphabet [Google], Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle and Adobe, which we call, collectively, Big Tech. We cover the years 2001-2020. We show that firms acquired by Big Tech are, disproportionately to the sectors in which they operate, concentrated in major tech clusters, and particularly in the Silicon Valley (San Francisco/San Jose). We argue that the acquisition market – and its effects on both the major tech hubs and the left behind rest – depends crucially on the proprietary control of access to various digital network products. Regulation of these markets, particularly in the form of common carrier status and open standards, could achieve a considerable re-balancing.
It is true that President Joe Biden has proposed increasing the capital gains tax, and it is very reasonable to think about how to respond to these potential rate increases. Indeed, in classes I teach to undergraduates and graduate students at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, I mention that selling ahead of a capital gains tax rate increase might be a smart move. But when is it?
My testimony will focus on perceptions of fairness in the tax code and recent proposals to fix such perceived unfairness; specifically, a tax on book income and the wealth tax. My main message is that corporations and individuals remit the taxes they do, including in situations some perceive as unfair, frequently because of explicit allowances in the tax code. In other words, the largest holes in our national tax revenue bucket are ones Congress has, itself, poked, and not the product of elaborate tax planning schemes, as is a current misperception.
These five techniques for writing problem statements can improve results from crowdsourced challenges.
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.
To what extent do consumers boycott in response to corporate tax planning? Anecdotes suggest consumer boycotts are a meaningful deterrent to tax planning, but empirical evidence on their frequency and impact is lacking. We undertake a comprehensive study to examine how consumers’ purchase behavior relates to corporate tax planning.
Recently proposed tax policies have financial accounting income (GAAP income, or book income) serve as part of the tax base. These proposals range from a flat tax on book income for corporations above a certain size, to using book income as part of a minimum tax for corporations above a certain size.
In short, including financial accounting income in the tax base will result in worse financial information for investors and less efficient tax collection, economically disadvantage companies based in the United States, politicize accounting standards, and require highly complex implementation, which may undermine the intention of current proposals. These arguments can be further understood below.
We examine how mission-oriented grand challenges—formed to address the public sector’s unmet needs through development of new technologies and products for high potential impact—originate and catalyze industry incubation. Our analysis of six prominent cases identifies the incubation process, consisting of: identification of unmet needs as a grand challenge, championing and articulation of a mission, leverage of private enterprise, and success or failure of the mission for subsequent industry emergence. The resulting conceptual model highlights key similarities and differences of industry incubation stemming from the public sector’s mission-oriented grand challenges relative to industries triggered by scientific discoveries or unmet user needs where the public sector is not as salient. The analysis reveals successful outcomes are associated with the public sector’s goal setting and carrying out “market functions” pertaining to selection, coordination, and knowledge sharing. We also provide cautions and caveats regarding fault lines that may arise in public-private partnerships.
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.
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.
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.
We axiomatize subjective probabilities on finite domains without requiring richness in the outcome space or restrictions on risk preference using Event Exchangeability (Chew and Sagi, 2006), which has been implicit in the prior literature (Savage, 1954; Machina and Schmeidler, 1992; Grant, 1995). In three successively stronger theorems, we characterize a probability representation of the exchangeability relation, followed by characterizing a unique subjective probability, and finally endowing this subjective probability with the property of reduction consistency—acts inducing the same lottery are indifferent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In financial markets, forward contracts reflect market perception of future price dynamics. Nontransparent markets, like commercial real estate investments, lack such tools. We use a panel of NYC office leases between 2005 and 2016 to estimate a dynamic term structure of forward lease rates (rental revenues), which reflects changing expectations by tenants and landlords about future rental contract conditions. Our imputed term structure is time-varying, generally upward-sloping, and often exhibits an inverted-U shape. We also find that shocks to forward lease rate dynamics are initially most keenly felt in the long-dated lease market and are subsequently transmitted to the short-term lease market.
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.
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.
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.
Retailers routinely post two prices on the price tag - a posted or sale price, and a higher regular or an advertised reference price. Together, these prices create a perception of an initial discount that the consumer is getting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this initial perceived discount (IPD) on the negotiated discount, demand and revenue when prices can be negotiated. Utilizing data from a large durable goods retailer where consumers are observed in their natural decision making environment, we first provide evidence that an increase in IPD is associated with a reduction in the negotiated discount. Next, we conduct a lab experiment where subjects make negotiation and purchase decisions for multiple products, and are randomly assigned to different values of IPD. Based on the experimental data, we estimate that a $1 increase in IPD lowers the negotiated discount by 4.7 cents, and that 75% of this decrease can be attributed to a reduction in the subject's likelihood to initiate a negotiation. As compared to fixed pricing, increase in demand accounts for only 54% of the increase in revenue as IPD increases; thereby, pointing to the importance of the effect of IPD on negotiated price. Finally, we find that a seller has an incentive to set an exaggerated advertised reference price under bargaining as compared to fixed pricing. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers, retailers and policy makers such as the Federal Trade Commission which closely monitor deceptive pricing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To better understand whether founder CEOs incorporate or ignore advice from their leadership team, we collected and analyzed data on more than 2,000 companies that went public from 1997 to 2013, roughly half of which were led by founders and the other half by hired (nonfounder) CEOs. We then examined whether and to what extent founder CEOs tune out their leadership team when making important strategic decisions. This examination uncovered surprising insights relevant for leaders of large and small organizations.
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.
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.
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.
What do Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Jimmy Carter and Franklin Roosevelt all have in common? They are all losers. So are Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Jeb Bush and George W. Bush. At least, according to their tax returns.
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.
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.
