AI Research Fellow, Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise; former Director of AI Research, KPMG AI Center of Excellence; Vice President, Watson Engineering, IBM
The Blockchain Club at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School was proud to host the Power of AI and Blockchain conference on Friday, Nov. 16, 2018. The goal of the conference was to expand student and community understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain topics with a focus on application.
Researchers take a closer look at the impact of entrepreneurs, policymakers, scientists and others during the pre-commercial stage of industry formation
Ted Zoller received one of the highest honors at the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers at their annual conference on Saturday, Sept. 28, in Stockholm, Sweden.
Postdoctoral scholars may be economic complements or substitutes for faculty, doctoral research assistants and capital in the production of university life science research. Using data on 120 US universities, we present two cross-sectional (1993 and 2006) descriptive econometric models. Results suggest that postdocs serve primarily as complements to other labour inputs and capital.
We reassess whether and to what degree the hiring, development, and promotion decisions of S&P 500® companies have led to misrepresentation of and bias against their minority executives. Instead of the US population benchmark that has conventionally been used to measure misrepresentation, and from such misrepresentation attribute the presence and magnitude of racial bias and discrimination, we measure misrepresentation in US executives using the benchmark of the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of their college cohort peers.
This paper investigates how institutions impact tie formation, arguing that institutions can direct firm strategies towards exploration or towards exploitation.
Often the story of successful places is predicated on the story of an individual who was instrumental in creating institutions and making connections that were transformative for a local economy. Certainly this is the case for Silicon Valley in California and Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford University, USA, who offered his garage to his students, Hewlett and Packard, and encouraged other start-ups. Or George Kozmetsky, the founder of Teledyne, who created the Institute for Innovation, Creativity and Capital (IC2) and mentored over 260 local computer companies in Austin, Texas. Any reading of the lives of these individuals highlights their connection to community and motivations beyond making profits.
The 2022 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises”. This article surveys the contributions of the three laureates and discusses how their insights have changed the way that academics and policymakers understand banks and their roles in financial crises.
Tomoki Tanaka, vice president of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and MUFG Bank, will join Rethinc. Labs for the next event in their Quantum webinar series. Working with researchers from the financial team at the IBM Q Network Hub at Keio University, Tanaka found several quantum algorithms that may be implementable in near-term devices for estimating the amplitude of a given quantum state. This is a core subroutine in various computing tasks, such as the Monte Carlo method.
This paper uses transaction-level import data at the shipment level to examine how multinational companies importing to the US have restructured their supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that companies sourced from fewer locations, reduced the share of imports from China, and increased the share of imports from other Asian countries, such as India and Vietnam, and North American countries, such as Canada and Mexico. For managers, our results imply that a one-size-fits-all mentality regarding supply chain disruption responses is not appropriate, and companies’ disruption-response strategies need to be tailored to individual supply chains’ circumstances.
We all know that North Carolina is a migration magnet. But just who’s moving into – and out of – the state? And what’s the impact on North Carolina’s economy and infrastructure? Jim Johnson, director of education, aging and economic development initiatives for the Kenan Institute, and Allan Parnell, vice president of the Cedar Institute for Sustainable Communities in Mebane, NC, go in search of answers.
Public health surveillance systems routinely process massive volumes of data to identify health adverse events affecting the general population. Surveillance and response to foodborne disease suffers from a number of systemic and other delays that hinder early detection and confirmation of emerging contamination situations. In this paper we develop an answer set programming (ASP) application to assist public health officials in detecting an emerging foodborne disease outbreak by integrating and analyzing in near real-time temporally, spatially and symptomatically diverse data. These data can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting systems from regulatory agencies. We encode geographic ontologies in ASP to infer spatial relationships that may not be evident using traditional statistical tools. These technologies and ontologies have been implemented in a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis Tool (NCFEDA). The application was built to demonstrate the potential of situational awareness—created through real-time data fusion, analytics, visualization, and real-time communication—to reduce latency of response to foodborne disease outbreaks by North Carolina public health personnel.
The NCFOODSAFE project bridges existing gaps in current North Carolina food safety systems by developing a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis (NCFEDA) tool, that provides situational awareness and intelligence about an intrinsically complex and dynamic process—the detection of and response to a foodborne disease outbreak. The project is informed by an understanding of the information sharing and communication structures among government agencies and other personnel responsible for regulating and overseeing the state’s food safety system.
We examine the links between human capital and endowment investing. Harnessing detailed information on university endowments, we find that higher asset allocations to alternative assets accompany higher levels of human capital in the endowment’s investment process. Moreover, high levels of human capital are linked to larger returns, even on a risk-adjusted basis.
On April 1-2, 2016, the Energy Center at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill convened a conference on “Global Frac’ing, What has to Change for it to be a Game Changer?” It was an invitation only event with attendance limited to industry experts, leading consultants and responsible government officials. Attendees and speakers came from the U.S., UK, Poland, Mexico and Canada. This report summarizes the main points which emerged from the speaker presentations and subsequent discussion. It does not attempt to be a comprehensive treatment of Global Frac’ing. Rather, it raises four sets of questions and presents the conclusions which developed. The Executive Summary provides an overview of these conclusions. The appendices share details on two matters much discussed – what would be a model regulatory regime for unconventional development, and what would constitute a model fiscal regime?
Financial openness is often associated with higher rates of economic growth. We show that the impact of openness on factor productivity growth is more important than the effect on capital growth. This explains why the growth effects of liberalization appear to be largely permanent, not temporary. We attribute these permanent liberalization effects to the role financial openness plays in stock market and banking sector development, and to changes in the quality of institutions.
Innovative data sources offer new ways of studying spatial and temporal industrial and regional development. Our approach is to study the development of an entrepreneurial regional economy through a comprehensive analysis of its constituent firms and institutions over time.