Director, Institute of African American Research; Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair in Public Policy, UNC College of Arts and Sciences
Program Liaison to the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development, NCGrowth
Combining the perspectives of practicing physicians, organized medicine, and competition policy, the writers review the challenges and benefits of price transparency, including the recent executive order and associated rulemaking directing providers to disclose negotiated and out-of-pocket costs for “shoppable” healthcare services.
Despite having the deepest and most diverse capital markets in the world, the United States still struggles to provide sufficient capital to many small businesses outside of major commercial centers as well as to women-owned and minority-owned businesses regardless of size or location. This paper reviews the academic literature and provides an analysis of some recent data to gain understanding of the causes of these gaps as well as the solutions for filling the gaps. Results indicate that the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program is an effective mechanism for providing capital to underserved geographies as well as to businesses owned by women and underrepresented minorities.
Brand naming challenges are more complex in logographic languages (e.g., Chinese), compared with phonographic languages (e.g., English) because the former languages feature looser correspondence between sound and meaning.
Profound demographic changes of all kinds are radically transforming America’s social, economic and political institutions. Perhaps one of the most troubling is something Urban Investment Strategies Center Director Dr. James Johnson calls the End of Men. The End of Men refers to the decade-long shift in the ratio of male to female students attending institutions of higher learning. The ratio of females to males born each year in the U.S. is roughly 50-50; the ratio among college students swings in favor of females, 60-40.
Conventional wisdom touts tax breaks and other economic incentives as the key to attracting out-of-state business. But do educational policies play an even bigger role? In a recent article in The New Republic, Brent Lane, economic strategist for the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, says a well-educated workforce is essential, and not just for winning business bids.
Multinational companies increasingly rely upon the work of virtual teams to manage their global intellectual assets and encourage innovation. Spanning functional, geographical and corporate boundaries, virtual team members work together on various projects but are based in different locations nationwide or worldwide.
In most sectors of the economy, competition is regarded as the way to improve quality and efficiency, lower costs, and increase innovations. Whether competition effectively achieves these improvements in health care, particularly with respect to hospital services, which remains the largest sector of spending for health care, is open to debate. Also debated, at least among some physicians, is whether functionally banning new physician-owned hospitals by prohibiting their participation in Medicare under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was too blunt an instrument to correct a problem that could have been fixed with a more nuanced regulatory solution, needlessly limiting a potential source of competition for hospital services.