5/6/2017 — We empirically study the spatiotemporal location problem motivated by an online retailer that uses the Buy-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store fulfillment method. Customers pick up their orders from trucks parked at specific locations on specific days, and the retailer’s problem is to determine where and when these pickups occur. Customer demand is influenced by the convenience of pickup locations and days.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• operations

5/4/2017 — Linguistic features of a firm’s regulatory filings, taken at face value, convey valuable information about the firm. In this paper, we examine whether a manager-specific, non-economic component also exists within these filings and whether investors consider this component when assessing firm value. To do so, we build on prior research that shows founders have unique personality attributes, including excessive optimism.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• management

5/2/2017 — Caller abandonment could depend on their past waiting experiences. Using Cox regressions we show that callers who abandoned or waited for a shorter time in the past abandon more in the future. However, Cox regression approach does not shed light on callers’ prior belief about the duration of their delays.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• operations

5/1/2017 — In modern work teams, successful performance requires adaptation to changing environments, tasks, situations, and role structures. Although empirical studies of team adaptive performance have generated key inferences about team adaptation in specific contexts, there are important conceptual differences across the adaptive stimuli examined in the literature (e.g., novel environments vs. downsizing).

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

5/1/2017 — We document that prior portfolio choices influence investors’ expectations about asset values, and their future choices. We find that people update more from information consistent with their prior choices, leading to sticky portfolios over time.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• risk management

5/1/2017 — Millions of employees face work schedules and wages that change frequently as firms try to match labor to demand. Here, we use personnel records from the retail industry to examine whether workers’ income precariousness impacts firm performance.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• workforce development

5/1/2017 — The design and use of standard processes are foundational recommendations in many operations practices. Yet, given the demonstrated performance benefits of standardized processes, it is surprising that they are often not followed consistently. One way to ensure greater compliance is by electronically monitoring the activities of individuals, although such aggressive monitoring poses the risk of inducing backlash.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

5/1/2017 — As waste from used electronic products grows steadily, manufacturers face take‐back regulations mandating its collection and proper treatment through recycling, or remanufacturing. Environmentalists greet such regulation with enthusiasm, but its effect on remanufacturing activity and industry competition remains unclear. We research these questions, using a stylized model with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) facing competition from an independent remanufacturer (IR).

• KEYWORD(S):
• policy
• risk management
• sustainability

5/1/2017 — We discuss firm-level evidence based on UK data showing that within-firm pay inequality--wage differentials between top- and bottom-level jobs--increases with firm size. Moreover, within-firm pay inequality rises as firms grow larger over time. Lastly, using wage data from 15 developed countries, we document a positive association between aggregate wage inequality at the country level and growth by the largest firms in the country. We conclude that part of what may be perceived as a global trend toward more wage inequality may be driven by an increase in the size of the largest firms in the economy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• inequality

5/1/2017 — We conduct what is, to our knowledge, the first systematic examination of Chinese-based firms that utilize a variable interest entity (VIE) structure to evade Chinese regulation on foreign ownership to list equity in the U.S. The use of the VIE structure is not only questionable under Chinese laws but also exacerbates the agency costs within the firm. We find that Chinese VIE firms have a Tobin’s Q as much as 35% lower than Chinese non-VIE firms, and this discount is concentrated in firms with higher risks of government intervention and managerial expropriation. To remediate these risks, VIE firms are more likely to have a politically connected director on the board, hire a Big N auditor and have higher levels of institutional ownership.

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

4/25/2017 — We investigate the effect of CFO narcissism, as measured by signature size, on financial reporting quality. Experimentally, we validate that narcissism predicts misreporting behavior, and that signature size predicts misreporting through its association with narcissism.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• c-suite
• ethics
• management

4/22/2017 — This paper examines the impact of NPD make/buy choices on product quality using data from the automobile industry. While the business press laments that NPD outsourcing compromises product quality, there is no systematic evidence to support or refute this assertion.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

4/14/2017 — In times when elevated government debt raises concerns about dimmer global growth prospects, we ask: How can the government provide incentives for innovation in a fiscally sustainable way? We address this question by examining the Ramsey problem of finding optimal tax and subsidy schemes in a model in which growth is endogenously sustained by risky innovation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• innovation

4/5/2017 — Attempts to improve gender parity at workplaces are more effective when organizations mobilize their entire workforce, including men, to participate (i.e., speak up with ideas, volunteer, or serve as champions) in gender-parity initiatives. Yet, frequently, men are hesitant to participate in such initiatives. We explicate one reason for such hesitation on the part of men and suggest ways organizations can address this challenge.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

4/1/2017 — Workplace humor is ubiquitous, yet scholars know little about how it affects employees' behaviors in organizations. We draw on an emerging psychological theory of humor—benign violation theory—to suggest that a leader's sense of humor often conveys counter-normative social information in organizations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• management
• organizational behavior

4/1/2017 — We investigate the influence of bank competition on agency costs by examining whether earnings management in the form of loan loss provision smoothing increases as the wedge between control rights and cash-flow rights increases.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• earnings

3/28/2017 — This paper illustrates the major challenges faced by globally recognised classical art forms through the examination of Kutiyattam, a centuries old renowned theatre form of India, Kutiyattam was declared by the UNESCO in 2001 as an intangible heritage of humankind. During the mid-twentieth century, Kutiyattam performers came out of their traditional performing space in Hindu temples, encouraged by the proactive support of the State. In the wake of the UNESCO recognition for the theatre form, State support measures underwent further strengthening. However, in spite of this, India’s Kutiyattam institutions are confronted with a serious economic crisis that threatens their very existence.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• sustainability

3/28/2017 — We present institutional change as a creative and experimental response to emergent or competing logics.

• KEYWORD(S):
• entrepreneurial ecosystems

3/21/2017 — We investigate the response of small businesses operating as sole proprietorships to Form 1099-K, an information report introduced in 2011 which provides the Internal Revenue Service with information about electronic sales (e.g., credit card sales). The overall impact of the policy appears to be relatively small. However, theory and distributional analysis isolates a subset of taxpayers expected to be especially sensitive to reporting, who report receipts equal to or slightly exceeding the receipts reported on 1099-K.

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

3/20/2017 — Professional service executives who base their professional relationships on individual ties bring more value to the firm.

• KEYWORD(S):
• management
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• workforce development

3/16/2017 — Markets today are flooded with an increasing number of products and brands, making it difficult for companies to track how their products compete in the market. In this article, the authors describe how they used clickstream data to visualize competition in product categories containing more than 1,000 products.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing
• technology

3/16/2017 — Can decision-maker roles—roles with responsibility for allocating resources toward ideas—shape which ideas people in those roles view as creative? Prior theory suggests that expertise should influence creativity assessments, yet examples abound of experts in different roles disagreeing about whether the same idea is creative. We build and test a social context model of creative idea recognition to show how decision-maker roles can shift creativity assessments. In an experimental study, we show that relative to non-decision-making roles, decision-making roles inculcate an economic mindset and so lead to downgrading otherwise creative ideas with cues of low social approval.

• KEYWORD(S):
• decision making

3/10/2017 — We study the response of international investment flows to short- and long-run growth news. Among developed G7 countries, positive long-run news for domestic productivity induces a net outflow of investments, in contrast to the effects of short-run growth shocks.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economic development
• finance
• global business

3/8/2017 — This paper investigates how institutions impact tie formation, arguing that institutions can direct firm strategies towards exploration or towards exploitation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• entrepreneurial ecosystems

3/6/2017 — In this paper we investigate the effect of offshore supply dependence (OSD) on offshoring–reshoring profit comparisons. We find that OSD hampers a reshoring manufacturer’s responsiveness to demand information updates and may significantly affect offshoring–reshoring comparisons, such that reshoring may yield lower profits than offshoring in many cases, including when offshoring has no baseline-cost advantage.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• operations
• supply chain

3/2/2017 — We document that higher measures of liquidity risk on banks balance sheets are associated with lower expected stock returns. We first calculate a measure of liquidity risk, referred to as the liquidity gap (LG), which reflects how much of a bank's volatile liabilities are covered by its stock of liquid assets.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity markets
• finance
• risk management

3/2/2017 — The dynamic procurement problem has long attracted academic and practitioner interest, and we solve it in an innovative data-driven way with proven theoretical guarantees. This work is also the first to leverage the power of covariate data in solving this problem.

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

3/1/2017 — An influential group of private sector leaders, university administrators, and government officials gathered at the Raleigh Convention Center on March 1st to craft actionable strategies to help the Research Triangle region attract and retain “C-Suite” talent to emerging high-growth companies in North Carolina.

• KEYWORD(S):
• c-suite
• economic development
• north carolina

3/1/2017 — This article examines the historical relation between oil price movements and both public and private equity investments in the energy sector. By utilizing two proprietary private equity databases (one at the fund level and the other at the company level), the authors are able to show that investments in energy-focused private equity offer diversification benefits relative to similarly focused public equity and direct energy commodity investments. They find that public equity investments perform better than direct investments in energy commodities. Energy-focused private equity outperforms energy-focused public equity.

• KEYWORD(S):
• private equity

3/1/2017 — We investigate whether a borrower's media coverage influences the syndicated loan origination and participation decisions of informationally disadvantaged lenders, loan syndicate structures, and interest spreads.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

3/1/2017 — In various forms, research on stress and well-being has been a part of the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) since its inception. In this review, we examine the history of stress research in JAP by tracking word frequencies from 606 abstracts of published articles in the journal.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

3/1/2017 — One of the most significant empirical findings of the behavioral finance literature is that investor sentiment affects asset prices. Baker and Wurgler (2006) finds that shares of certain firms — those that are difficult to value — are more affected by shifts in investor sentiment. We examine whether the accounting information of firms that are inherently difficult to value can mitigate sentiment-related mispricing. Our findings indicate that sentiment-related mispricing is in fact diminished in the subset of firms with high-quality accounting information.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• asset pricing
• finance

3/1/2017 — We discuss the evolution of research on textual attributes in accounting and suggest potential directions for future research using Cazier and Pfeiffer (2017) to illustrate the challenges and opportunities in the literature. We categorize the literature based on whether a given textual attribute is assumed to be “discretionary” versus “nondiscretionary” and whether it is assumed to be “helpful” versus “harmful.” The literature to date has been largely descriptive, with limited focus on causality, and we argue that there are substantial opportunities for research that better isolate the discretionary components of textual disclosure, as well as identifying specific contexts in which a given attribute is more likely to be helpful than harmful.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

2/28/2017 — Energy Geopolitics: The policies and interaction of nation states focused on their development, sale & acquisition of essential Energy supplies. It is focused on behavior of nation states, and concerned with vital role of energy in national economic life & security. This becomes clearer when we list the issues: Physical shortage, due to supply interruption or boycott; political blackmail, under the threat of interrupted supply; price spikes, due to tight market conditions or supply curtailment; economic development, fostering wealth creation & jobs; and environmental consequences, including Climate change.

• KEYWORD(S):
• energy
• sustainability

2/23/2017 — Traditional models of operations management involve dynamic decision-making assuming optimal (Bayesian) updating. However, behavioral theory suggests that individuals exhibit bias in their beliefs and decisions. We conduct both a field study and two laboratory studies to examine the phenomena in the context of health. In particular, we examine how an individual’s prior experiences and the experiences of those around them alter the operational decisions that the individual makes.

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

2/15/2017 — “Entrepreneurship as a field is remarkably multidisciplinary,” said Paige Ouimet, an associate professor of finance at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. “I think we all know this. Just look around the room.”

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship

2/10/2017 — UNC’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Duke University Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) initiative have embarked on a joint initiative to build a data repository to facilitate empirical research in entrepreneurship.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship

2/9/2017 — We study how public and private disclosure requirements interact to influence both tax regulator enforcement and firm disclosure. We find that, following Schedule UTP, firms significantly increased the quantity and altered the content of their tax‐related disclosures, consistent with lower tax‐related proprietary costs of disclosure. Our results suggest that changes in SEC disclosure requirements altered the IRS's behavior with regard to public information acquisition, and, relatedly, changes in IRS private disclosure requirements appear to change firms’ public disclosure behavior.

• KEYWORD(S):
• financial reporting
• tax

2/6/2017 — In this paper, we examine how connecting to beneficiaries of one’s work increases performance, and argue that beneficiaries internal to an organization (i.e., one’s own colleague) can serve as an important source of motivation, even in jobs that — on the surface — may seem routine and low on potential impact. We suggest that this occurs because words of beneficiaries strengthen one’s sense of belongingness, a key driver of human behavior.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• operations

2/1/2017 — We investigate whether firms in close customer–supplier relationships are better able to identify and implement tax avoidance strategies via supply chains. Consistent with our prediction, we find that both principal customers and their dependent suppliers avoid more taxes than other firms. Further analysis suggests that principal customers and dependent suppliers likely engage in tax strategies involving shifting profits to tax haven subsidiaries.

• KEYWORD(S):
• international tax
• supply chain

2/1/2017 — We examine the human capital of IPO-filing firms and how going public affects their labor force. IPO-filing firms have high average wages and limited industrial diversification. Moreover, we document that a successful IPO increases departures of high-skilled employees to startups and diversification though employment growth in non-core industries.

• KEYWORD(S):
• labor

2/1/2017 — We consider the inventory management problem of a firm reacting to potential change points in demand, which we define as known epochs at which the demand distribution may (or may not) abruptly change. Motivating examples include global news events (e.g., the 9/11 terrorist attacks), local events (e.g., the opening of a nearby attraction), or internal events (e.g., a product redesign).

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• economics
• innovation
• operations
• supply chain

2/1/2017 — This paper examines the relation between cognitive perceptions of management and firm valuation. We develop a composite measure of investor perception using 30-second content-filtered video clips of initial public offering (IPO) roadshow presentations. We show that this measure, designed to capture viewers’ overall perceptions of a CEO, is positively associated with pricing at all stages of the IPO (proposed price, offer price, and end of first day of trading).

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• management

2/1/2017 — This paper investigates whether by exposing superiors to moral symbols, subordinates can discourage their superiors from asking them to perform unethical acts.

• KEYWORD(S):
• ethics
• organizational behavior

2/1/2017 — This study investigates how the organizational reporting structure of the university technology licensing office (TLO) and the educational background and experience of the TLO director affect the technology transfer process.

1/27/2017 — Workplace relationships are a cornerstone of management research. At the same time, there remain pressing calls for work relationships to be front and center in management literature, demanding an organizationally specific “relationship science.” This article addresses these calls by unifying multiple scholarly fields of interest to develop a comprehensive understanding of interpersonal workplace relationships.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior
• workforce development

1/25/2017 — On October 14, 2016, the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School hosted a conference titled What’s Next, America. Convened fewer than four weeks prior to the presidential election, the objective of the forum was to allow influential business leaders, academics and policy makers to examine issues critical to the U.S. economy now and in the future. The conference offered actionable solutions to the most important economic issues facing the next administration.

• KEYWORD(S):
• aging
• inclusive development
• inequality
• innovation

1/23/2017 — This study provides evidence on whether investors value tax gross-up provisions for executives, and how the elimination of these provisions changes executive compensation. We examine the market response to tax gross-up eliminations and find investors react favorably to the removal of these provisions, suggesting that on average, investors perceived these agreements as a bad compensation practice that destroyed firm value.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity markets
• tax

1/18/2017 — Competing technologies in emerging industries create uncertainties that discourage supplier investments. Open technology can induce supplier investments, but may also lead to intensified future competition. In this paper, we study competing manufacturers’ open-technology strategies. We show that despite the risk of intensifying future competition, open technologies by competing manufacturers may constitute an equilibrium and can indeed induce supplier investments.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• technology

1/17/2017 — Why are downturns following high valuations of firms long and severe? Why do firms choose high debt when they anticipate high valuations, and underperform subsequently? We propose a theory of financing cycles where the importance of creditors’ control rights over cash flows (“pledgeability”) varies with industry liquidity.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance