9/19/2017 — Elevated levels of government debt raise concerns about their effects on long-term growth prospects. Using the cross section of US stock returns, we show that (i) high-R&D firms are more exposed to government debt and pay higher expected returns than low-R&D firms; and (ii) higher levels of the debt-to-GDP ratio predict higher risk premia for high-R&D firms.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• finance
• innovation

9/17/2017 — Universities have become essential players in the generation of knowledge and innovation. Through the commercialization of technology, they have developed the ability to influence regional economic growth. By examining different commercialization models this book analyses technology transfer at universities as part of a national and regional system.

• KEYWORD(S):
• entrepreneurial ecosystems

9/16/2017 — My particular path has contained, as most paths do, twists and turns. As I look back, they all seem somehow related to each other, but they were not all planned. Design/methodology/approach I will discuss my life and career in chronological order, then reflect on my career and research philosophy. I will also discuss several of my most cited articles and how they emerged. Findings I emphasize research that is both academically rigorous and relevant to business. I also show that passion for a subject, even one that is risky and not encouraged by others, has resulted in lifelong interest and inspiration for me.

• KEYWORD(S):
• knowledge management
• marketing

9/15/2017 — Various areas are examined in regards to current energy policies in the new administration.

• KEYWORD(S):
• energy

9/12/2017 — Economic recoveries can be slow, fast, or involve double dips. This paper provides an explanation based on the dynamic interactions between bank lending standards and firm entry selection. In the model, bank lending standards refer to both how banks screen borrowers with unknown quality and whether well-qualified borrowers are credit rationed, and firm entry selection refers to the mechanism through which financing conditions select firms of different quality to enter the lending market.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• risk management
• strategy and entrepreneurship

9/1/2017 — We examine whether firms hold more cash in the face of tax uncertainty. Because of gray areas in the tax law and aggressive tax avoidance, the total amount of tax that a firm will pay is uncertain at the time it files its returns. The tax authorities can challenge and disallow the firm’s tax positions, demanding additional cash tax payments.

• KEYWORD(S):
• federal tax

9/1/2017 — We empirically investigate the effects of political uncertainty on corporate tax behavior. To identify the effects of political uncertainty, we construct a data set that tracks whether firms’ tax avoidance varies systematically around the occurrence of national elections. Our dataset includes firms exposed to 103 national elections in 30 countries. We find that corporate tax avoidance varies systematically across the election cycle, peaking in election years and declining the next year. The effect on tax avoidance is greatest for elections with greater electoral uncertainty, and for elections in countries with relatively lower quality of law, relatively weaker tax enforcement, and relatively lower book-tax conformity. The evidence suggests that firms use both conforming and nonconforming tax avoidance strategies, although the results for conforming tax avoidance are marginal.

• KEYWORD(S):
• federal tax
• global business

9/1/2017 — Our analysis of how banks’ responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that, for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets, procyclical leverage does not occur. For banks without a binding constraint, fair value and bank regulation both can contribute to procyclical leverage. Empirical findings based on a large sample of U.S. commercial banks reveal that bank regulation explains procyclical leverage for banks relatively close to the regulatory leverage constraint and contributes to procyclical leverage for those that are not. We also show that fair value accounting does not contribute to procyclical leverage.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• finance
• leverage

9/1/2017 — This study shows that initiation of CDS trading for an entity’s debt increases the share of loans retained by loan syndicate lead arrangers and increases loan spread. These findings are consistent with CDS initiation reducing the effectiveness of a lead arranger’s stake in the loan to serve as a mechanism to address the adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the loan syndicate.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• decision making
• finance
• investments

8/30/2017 — Work scheduling research typically prescribes task sequences implemented by managers. Yet employees often have discretion to deviate from their prescribed sequence. Using data from 2.4 million radiological diagnoses, we find that doctors prioritize similar tasks (batching) and those tasks they expect to complete faster (shortest expected processing time).

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• supply chain
• technology

8/18/2017 — This study examines whether key characteristics of analysts’ forecasts—timeliness, accuracy, and informativeness—change when investor demand for information is likely to be especially high, i.e., during periods of high uncertainty. Findings reveal that when uncertainty is high, analysts’ forecasts are more timely but less accurate. However, analysts’ forecasts are also more informative to the market, which is consistent with investors’ demand for timely information, even if it is less accurate.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• investments

8/15/2017 — To scale service operations requires sharing knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge sharing networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository (KR) has the potential to help peripheral individuals gain access to valuable knowledge because it is universally available and can be used without social interaction.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• technology
• workforce development

8/11/2017 — This April, the UNC Tax Center once again welcomed guests from across the country and around the world to Chapel Hill for our 20th Annual UNC Tax Symposium. The event was a great success, with participants ranging from academic researchers in accounting, finance, law and economics to policymakers and practitioners with an interest in evidence-based tax research.

• KEYWORD(S):
• federal tax
• international tax
• state and local tax

8/1/2017 — We propose a novel approach to measuring firm-level risk exposures and costs of equity. Using a simple consumption-based asset pricing model that explains nearly two-thirds of the variation in average returns across 55 anomaly portfolios, we map the relation between exposures to consumption risk and portfolio-level characteristics. We use this relation to calculate exposures to consumption risk at the firm level and show that the calculated consumption risk exposures yield portfolios with large differences in average returns and ex post consumption risk exposures consistent with those predicted by our calculated betas.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• risk management

8/1/2017 — We investigate the relation between tax avoidance and tax uncertainty, where tax uncertainty is the possibility of losing a claimed tax benefit upon challenge by a tax authority. On average, we find that tax avoiders, i.e., firms with relatively low cash tax rates, do bear significantly greater tax uncertainty than firms that have higher cash tax rates. However, we find that this relation is driven by firms with tax haven subsidiaries and high levels of R&D expense, proxies for intangible-related transfer pricing strategies. Thus, contrary to expectations, general tax avoidance (i.e., unrelated to tax havens) does not explain variation in tax uncertainty. The findings have implications for several puzzling results in the literature but also raise new questions.

8/1/2017 — In business-to-business markets, top marketing and sales executives (TMSEs) have considerable influence on their organizations’ customer strategies. When TMSEs switch firms, a pattern of informal organizational connections results; this pattern reflects the flow of information and knowledge among firms and creates managerial social capital in the process. To model this information flow, the current study considers information reach and richness, conceptualized according to the network position (i.e., centrality and brokerage) of the firm in the TMSE mobility network, which can be constructed by tracing executive movements through the work experience records of TMSEs in an industry.

• KEYWORD(S):
• knowledge management
• marketing

8/1/2017 — Theory building from multiple cases has generated some of the most cited and intriguing research over the last 80 years. Yet there remains confusion regarding how to judge its rigor.

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

7/24/2017 — We examine how abnormal dark market share changes at earnings announcements and find a statistically and economically significant increase in abnormal dark market share in the weeks prior to, during, and following the earnings announcement.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• earnings

7/24/2017 — We study the dynamics of pricing efficiency in the equity REIT market from 1993 to 2014. We measure pricing efficiency at the firm level using variance ratios calculated from quote midpoints in the TAQ database.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity markets
• real estate

7/21/2017 — We study the use of residual income (RI) valuation methods by U.S. sell-side equity analysts, particularly as compared to DCF. We document that RI valuations are rare — just 1/16th as common as DCF — and that different RI and DCF valuations are not infrequently provided by the same analyst for the same firm in the same report.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• equity markets

7/20/2017 — We consider the problem of minimizing daily expected resource usage and overtime costs across multiple parallel resources such as anesthesiologists and operating rooms, which are used to conduct a variety of surgical procedures at large multispecialty hospitals. To address this problem, we develop a two-stage, mixed-integer stochastic dynamic programming model with recourse.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• healthcare
• operations

7/19/2017 — In this paper, we study within firm heterogeneity in the discounts offered to consumers. Utilizing transaction level data from a large home appliance retailer, we quantify the extent of both across and within-salesperson heterogeneity in the discounts they negotiate with consumers.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• marketing

7/17/2017 — It is generally accepted that operating with a combined (i.e., pooled) queue rather than separate (i.e., dedicated) queues is beneficial mainly because pooling queues reduces long-run average throughput time. In fact, this is a well-established result in the literature, e.g., when servers and jobs are identical. We consider an observable multi-server queueing system which can be operated with either dedicated queues or a pooled one.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• operations
• technology

7/15/2017 — Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price for big-ticket items such as home appliances and automobiles, and on online platforms such as Amazon and eBay. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to selling only at posted prices, depends on consumers’ willingness to initiate a negotiation and ability to negotiate a discount. In this article, the authors incorporate consumers’ decision of whether to negotiate into a demand model.

• KEYWORD(S):
• earnings
• marketing

7/15/2017 — We evaluate sell-side equity analysts’ multiyear forecasted income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements, and the profitability, efficiency and leverage ratios that they imply.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• equity markets

7/14/2017 — No. In the presence of speculative opportunities, investors can learn about both asset fundamentals and the beliefs of other traders. We show that this learning exhibits complementarity: learning more along one dimension increases the value of learning about the other. As a result, regulatory changes may be counterproductive.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• investments

7/13/2017 — Examining the strategy formation process is central to understanding why some firms in entrepreneurial settings create competitive advantage and succeed while others do not. While existing work shows the value of learning from experience or having a holistic understanding of how the pieces fit together, there is limited empirical research that fuses the two streams. We first review the extant literature on strategy formation in entrepreneurial settings by organizing around this fundamental tension between strategizing by “doing” versus “thinking.” We then describe recent work that blends the two and conclude with a future research agenda.

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

7/12/2017 — Jim Johnson presented at the North Carolina Local Government Budget Association's 2017 Summer Conference in Wilmington about signs of global aging, key drivers, and opportunities for economic development.

• KEYWORD(S):
• aging
• disruptive demographics
• inclusive development

7/11/2017 — Negotiation role-playing simulations are among the most effective and widely used methods for teaching and conducting research on negotiations. Teachers and researchers can either license a published, “off-the-shelf” simulation or write their own custom “bespoke” simulation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

7/10/2017 — On March 1-2, approximately 1,000 people convened at the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education in Chapel Hill for the fourth annual UNC Clean Tech Summit. Themes of the 2017 summit included clean energy, food, innovation, and water and energy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• energy
• sustainability
• technology

7/7/2017 — The study of congruence is central to organizational research. Congruence refers to the fit, match, similarity, or agreement between two constructs and is typically framed as a predictor of outcomes relevant to individuals and organizations. Previous studies often operationalized congruence as the algebraic, absolute, or squared difference between two component variables.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• organizational behavior

7/1/2017 — Firms are increasingly offering engagement initiatives to facilitate firm–customer interactions or interactions among customers, with the primary goal of fostering emotional and psychological bonds between customers and the firm. Unlike traditional marketing interventions, which are designed to prompt sales, assessing returns on engagement initiatives (RoEI) is more complex because sales are not the primary goal and, often, direct sales are not associated with such initiatives.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity markets
• global business
• marketing

6/26/2017 — How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can increase their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• operations

6/19/2017 — Worker attrition is a costly and operationally disruptive challenge throughout the world. Although large bodies of research have documented drivers of attrition and its operational consequences, managers still lack an integrated approach to understanding attrition and making decisions to address it on a forward-going basis.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• global business
• operations

6/18/2017 — This paper exploits policy discontinuities at U.S. state borders to examine the effect of R&D investments on innovative projects. We examine the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) State Match program.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• north carolina
• policy

6/14/2017 — In the electronics industry and beyond, original design manufacturers (ODMs) provide a full spectrum of services, ranging from design and development to manufacturing, to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

6/13/2017 — This case study describes the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Durham, North Carolina – the people and organizations primarily located downtown who embrace this mission.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship

6/13/2017 — We evaluate the performance of two popular systemic risk measures, CoVaR and SRISK, during eight financial panics in the era before FDIC insurance. Bank stock price and balance sheet data were not readily available for this time period. We rectify this shortcoming by constructing a novel dataset for the New York banking system before 1933.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance
• risk management

6/8/2017 — When an innovator sources for an innovative product from a supplier who is also a competitor in the end market, the potential innovation spillover may be a serious concern. Will an innovation ever source from a competitor-supplier in the presence of innovation spillover? In this paper we attempt to answer this question with an emphasis on the ex-ante uncertain values of innovations, and distinguish between technical innovations which can only spill over through sourcing and non-technical innovations which can spill over through sourcing as well as in the market.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• operations

6/8/2017 — We measure a bank’s connectedness by constructing a measure of its text similarity with other banks based on 10-K business description and MD&A discussions. We find that tail-risk comovement between a given bank and the banking system is increasing in the bank’s average similarity.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• data project
• tax

6/1/2017 — We investigate systematic changes in corporate effective tax rates over the past 25 years and find that effective tax rates have decreased significantly. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the decline in effective tax rates is not concentrated in multinational firms; effective tax rates have declined at approximately the same rate for both multinational and domestic firms. Moreover, within multinational firms, both foreign and domestic effective rates have decreased. Finally, changes in firm characteristics and declining foreign statutory tax rates explain little of the overall decrease in effective rates.

• KEYWORD(S):
• federal tax

6/1/2017 — Inspired by recent discussions of the systematic costs that external rankings impose on academic institutions, and the undeniable shifts in the landscape of institutional data, a concerted and pragmatic re-evaluation of ranking efforts has begun. In this study, multiple administrators and researchers representing both public and private institutions across the United States weigh in on these issues.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing
• organizational behavior

6/1/2017 — An experienced investment committee can put an institution on course to gain higher endowment returns.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

6/1/2017 — This special issue is intended to present the state-of-the-art research progress on related subjects and to foster additional research in this important emerging area in production and operations management.

• KEYWORD(S):
• management
• operations

6/1/2017 — In this paper, we study the problem of allocating inventory procured using donor funding to patients in different health states over a finite horizon with the objective of minimizing the number of disease‐adjusted life periods lost.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• management
• operations

5/30/2017 — A pooled Public Use Microdata Sample File of the Census Bureau’s Annual American Community Survey (2011-2015) is used to (1) create a demographic profile of the nation’s older adult population; (2) develop an older adult household typology which encapsulates both generational dynamics and diverse living arrangements; and (3) identify older adults who face the greatest barriers to aging in place. Policies and strategies that support and facilitate successful aging in place for the most vulnerable older adults are discussed.

• KEYWORD(S):
• aging
• disruptive demographics
• inclusive development

5/29/2017 — We consider the allocation of inventory to stores in a “merchandise test,” whereby a fashion retailer deploys a new product to stores in limited quantities in order to learn about demand prior to the main selling season. Our problem formulation includes practical considerations like fixed costs and multiperiod inventory considerations but is challenging to analyze directly. Instead, we take a bounding approach that isolates the novel aspect of our problem: the impact of test inventory allocation on demand learning.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• supply chain
• technology

5/26/2017 — This study examines the effects of mandatory IFRS adoption on accounting-based prediction models for CDS spreads for a sample of 357 firms in 16 IFRS-adopting countries. We do this by estimating accounting-based prediction models for CDS spreads separately for financial and non-financial firms before and after mandatory IFRS adoption. We find that mean and median absolute percentage prediction errors are larger for both financial and non-financial firms after mandatory IFRS adoption. We also estimate accounting-based prediction models for CDS spreads separately for financial and non-financial US firms before and after mandatory IFRS adoption to obtain prediction errors serve that as a benchmark.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• global business

5/23/2017 — Prior studies attribute analysts' forecast superiority over time-series forecasting models to their access to a large set of firm, industry, and macroeconomic information (an information advantage), which they use to update their forecasts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis (a timing advantage).

• KEYWORD(S):
• earnings
• finance

5/20/2017 — Across the globe, every workday people commute an average of 38 minutes each way, yet surprisingly little research has examined the implications of this daily routine for work-related outcomes. Integrating theories of boundary work, self-control, and work-family conflict, we propose that the commute to work serves as a liminal role transition between home and work roles, prompting employees to engage in boundary management strategies.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• operations
• organizational behavior