A new personal gift from Bruce Van Saun, Citizens Financial Group Inc. chairman and CEO, and his wife, Kathleen (Katie) Van Saun, will support the Kenan Institute’s annual grand challenge. Starting in 2023, the three-year gift will support the institute’s Distinguished Fellows, who advance thought leadership around the grand challenge’s theme, a key issue that affects business and society. The program is making its debut this year with an exploration of stakeholder capitalism and ESG investing. The Van Sauns earned their MBAs from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School in 1983 and were married in 1985.
Hear from Kenan Institute and affiliated experts about why the time is now for a deep-dive exploration of stakeholder capitalism and ESG investing – forces which have already begun shaping business and economic outcomes on a global scale.
The 12th annual Alternative Investments Conference, hosted by the Institute for Private Capital and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, was previewed in a WRAL TechWire article on March 27. The conference will cover the latest themes and trends in private equity, hedge funds, real assets, venture capital and other alternative investment types.
The Institute for Private Capital's (IPC) 12th annual Alternative Investments Conference held on March 28 focused on "positioning portfolios for the late-stage cycle environment." Kenan Institute Executive Director and IPC Research Director Greg Brown said, "As we get closer to what looks like a cyclical peak, investors are seeking more defensive investment opportunities.”
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor Christian Lundblad discussed the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ fresh employment report and what it means for the U.S. economy at the Kenan Institute’s virtual press briefing on Friday, Nov. 4.
Professor Jim Johnson, director of the Kenan Institute-affiliated Urban Investment Strategies Center, recently penned an op-ed for the Raleigh News and Observer on the importance of immigrants in an aging U.S. economy. Johnson co-authored the piece with Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities Vice President Allan M. Parnell.
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School's Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise will launch the Luther Hodges Scholars program in fall 2023, thanks to a naming gift from Carolina alumnus Luther Hodges.
As Global Entrepreneurship Week begins, Professor Ted Zoller, faculty director of the Kenan Institute-affiliated UNC Entrepreneurship Center, discusses what UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School is doing to drive innovation in entrepreneurship education and prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs for success.
Following last week’s debate about the overheating economy, Kenan Institute experts return this week for round two – this time focusing on policy. In this week's insight, Kenan Institute’s Executive Director Greg Brown and Chief Economist Gerald Cohen debate the pandemic’s influence on U.S. fiscal policies.
Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown explains how work the Institute for Private Capital is doing is helping to predict PE performance to the EY NextWave Private Equity Podcast.
The COVID-19 financial downturn will have short- and long-term effects on personal and consumer finance, as explored by a panel of Kenan Institute-convened experts during a press briefing held yesterday. The full recording of this briefing—along with a deeper-dive analysis on the specific implications of the downturn on personal retirement income by Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown—is available in this week’s Kenan Insight.
The rise of crowdsourcing platforms as a potential source for innovative ideas presents a challenge: How do you attract contributors to work on your particular problem?1 Past research has demonstrated the importance of well-crafted problem statements as a means to attract more innovative solutions. But what really goes into a problem statement that engages the crowd? Do the statements that attract a large number of proposed ideas share common elements?
This invitation-only symposium will be similar in structure and style to the longstanding PERC Symposium held in the fall in Chapel Hill. This event will supplement and bring new topics to light in the ever-expanding field of private equity research.
Community banks are the central financial institution in many places. They have the capacity to alleviate credit constraints of small firms. This may increase economic resilience, delaying or mitigating the effects of the Great Recession. We estimate how the county-level banking access and community bank market share affect both the timing and duration of the Great Recession. Using the Cox Proportional Hazards Model, we find that communities with a higher community bank market share are either less likely to experience recession conditions, or experience these conditions later. Using the Heckman Selection model, we confirm these results, and show that communities with a higher community bank market share are less likely to experience recession conditions. This research provides the first link between local financial institutions, and economic resilience.
With growing prominence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) issues, we witness enhanced scrutiny of the public stance and statements of organizational actors. For example, two such statements by Tucker Carlson, known for his primetime show on Fox News, one on immigration (2018) and the other on the Black Lives Matter (2020) movement, pushed nongovernmental organizations, such as Media Matters, to sociopolitical activism by putting pressures on advertisers to boycott the show. This mingling of DEI, sociopolitical activism, and associated economic effects raises a critical research question: what is the economic consequence of DEI stances that arouse sociopolitical activism and what are the underlying mechanisms for the economic consequences?
Prior research documents conflicting evidence that R&D investment both increases and decreases firm risk. We propose a parsimonious framework that explains this conflicting evidence.
Applied financial econometrics subjects are featured in this second volume, with papers that survey important research even as they make unique empirical contributions to the literature. These subjects are familiar: portfolio choice, trading volume, the risk-return tradeoff, option pricing, bond yields, and the management, supervision, and measurement of extreme and infrequent risks.
Why do managers act unfairly even when they recognize the significant organizational benefits of treating employees fairly? Prior research has explained this puzzling phenomenon predominantly through an “actor-centric” perspective, proposing that managers’ just behavior is an outcome of their own individual differences.
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.
There has been renewed advocacy for restrictions on international financial flows in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Motivated by this trend, we explore the extent to which cross-border flows affect real economic activity. Unlike previous research efforts that focus on aggregated capital flows, we exploit novel data on forced trading by global mutual funds as a plausible source of exogenous flow shocks. Such forced trading is known to generate large liquidity and price effects, but its real impacts have not been studied extensively. We find that both country- and firm-level investment growth rates are significantly affected by these exogenous capital shocks, and that their effect is more pronounced for firms whose marginal investment decisions are more equity-reliant.