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.
Gregory W. Brown has been named director of the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School.
The U.S. spends significantly less on child care than other developed nations, and the consequences of that spending became evident during the pandemic – particularly within underserved communities. In this week’s insight, our experts discuss why the U.S. should prioritize and fund early childhood education and care.
The third annual invitation-only Frontiers of Entrepreneurship conference, hosted by the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and its affiliated Entrepreneurship Center, will gather a highly curated group of 150 leaders from academia, industry and government to discuss leading-edge research on private business ventures and explore ways to sustain and advance entrepreneurship.
As part of the “Investment Strategies” breakout session at the Investing in Affordable Housing Symposium, Erin Smith of Bank of America's Community Development Corporation, Pamela Watkins-West of Nuveen and Wade Casstevens of Linden Property Group discussed ways in which organizations are looking at new and innovative investment strategies to expand affordable housing creation and preservation in the region.
The Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise welcomed Key Square Group Founder, CEO and CIO Scott Bessent on Wednesday, March 7, to have lunch with its Kenan Scholars and field questions about hedge fund management, economics education and starting an investment career.
This article introduces structured machine learning regressions for high-dimensional time series data potentially sampled at different frequencies. The sparse-group LASSO estimator can take advantage of such time series data structures and outperforms the unstructured LASSO. We establish oracle inequalities for the sparse-group LASSO estimator within a framework that allows for the mixing processes and recognizes that the financial and the macroeconomic data may have heavier than exponential tails.
A panel of experts convened by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, its affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Institute of African American Research will offer a press briefing via webinar on the intersection of the COVID-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement—providing a framework for developing solutions to achieve equitable public health and economic outcomes for the short- and long-term.
As The Wall Street Journal reported this week, Congress is gearing up for a potential showdown with the largest tech companies in the U.S. And with a bipartisan group of representatives pushing for legislation that would dismantle the monopoly power of Big Tech, this week's Kenan Insight revisits research on how regulating Amazon, Apple and others may be key to reviving the economies of America’s held-back cities and regions.
In this paper, we develop a sociodemographic profile of the most vulnerable African American older adult households. To do so, we draw data from the 2011–15 American Community Survey, which contains linked housing and person records for a 5 percent sample of U.S. population. This dataset literally allows us to peer inside of African American older adult households and in the process identify the major barriers or obstacles to aging in place.
American Community Survey data are used to develop typologies of the generational dynamics and living arrangements of the estimated 1.6 million African American older adult households who will likely encounter the most difficulty aging in place. Policy recommendations and strategies are offered to address the specific barriers and challenges that must be overcome in order for these older adults to successfully live out their lives in their homes and community.
African American older adults face a major retirement crisis (Rhee, 2013; Vinik, 2015)). Owing to a legacy of racial discrimination in education, housing, employment, and wages or salaries, they are less likely than their white counterparts to have accumulated wealth over the course of their lives (Sykes, 2016). In 2013, the median net worth of African American older adult households ($56,700) was roughly one-fifth of the median net worth of white older adult households ($255,000) (Rosnick and Baker, 2014). Not surprising, given these disparities in net worth, African American older adult males (17%) and females (21%) were much more likely than their white male (5%) and female (10%) counterparts to live in poverty (Johnson and Parnell, 2016; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013a). They also were more likely to experience disabilities earlier in life and to have shorter life expectancies (Freedman and Spillman, 2016).
The Kenan Institute and Fifth Third Bank will present insights from our new collaboration, “Empowering American Cities,” at a breakfast Tuesday, June 25, in Charlotte.
Michael Byrd, Kenan Scholars class of 2022, shares his insights on the program's orientation which took place on Jan. 10 and 11.
Bringing a medical device to market requires startup founders to overcome challenges they may be ill-equipped to tackle. Alliances with former employers can help, but startups must carefully choose which markets they target.
COVID-19 first caused chaos in our labor markets with the lockdowns of 2020, which sent unemployment rates soaring to all-time highs. It has continued to disrupt labor markets into 2022 as worries about health risks have kept workers at home, exasperating labor shortages. Looking forward, as we learn to live with COVID, we will also have to adapt to the effects of long COVID, when symptoms such as fatigue, difficulty breathing and “brain fog” appear after COVID. In this commentary, I attempt to assess the risk to our labor markets from long COVID.
How the U.S. is experiencing inflation shows considerable variation from place to place.
Stith, a Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow, will moderate a panel on strategies to build a sustainable workforce pipeline in North Carolina.
From the perspective of customers, there are two types of counterfeit products: deceptive and non-deceptive counterfeits. In the case of non-deceptive counterfeits, a customer can distinguish between a genuine article and a counterfeit version; she may still buy the counterfeit item because she cannot afford the genuine product. In contrast, the customer cannot differentiate a deceptive counterfeit item from the genuine product before buying it. Both types of counterfeits negatively affect a manufacturer’s profit and brand.
As the historic 2020 U.S. presidential election draws nearer, voters are taking stock of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on their lives and livelihoods, and demanding that policymakers present their plans for economic recovery. In this Kenan Insight, we look at the major forces reshaping the U.S. economy and offer suggestions for forging an intentional and equitable path forward.