We examine the relation between plant-level predictive analytics use and centralization of authority for more than 25,000 manufacturing plants using proprietary US Census data. We focus on headquarters authority over plants through delegation of decision-making and design of performance-based incentives.
Why do firms offer non-wage compensation instead of the equivalent amount in financial compensation? We argue that firms use nonwage benefits, specifically female-friendly benefits, such as maternity leave, to increase gender diversity by efficiently attracting women.
Faced with demand uncertainty and heterogeneity in a nascent industry, entrants often consider how many customer segments to serve by tailoring the usage breadth of their product portfolios. Portfolio usage breadth is the extent to which products in a portfolio collectively span distinct customer segments. We suggest that when entrants have use experience in contexts that are potential users of the new product, their portfolios exhibit low usage breadth, due to demand-oriented cognition and knowledge.
On Wednesday, September 22, Piedmont Capital Partners Co-founder and Managing Partner Louise Brady and Partner Bobby Long joined UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford to kick off the 2021-2022 Dean’s Speaker Series. Check out their fireside chat to hear the experts’ takes on economic regionalism, the industries most ripe for investment and growth amid and beyond COVID-19, and the role business should play to stem the pandemic-induced exodus of women from the workforce.
Research and practice suggest that cofounded ventures outperform solo-founded ventures. Yet, little work has explored the conditions under which solo founding might be preferable to cofounding. Combining an inductive case-oriented analysis with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 70 new entrepreneurial ventures, we examine why and how solo founders can be as successful as their peers in cofounded ventures.
To encourage year-long engagement and invite more people into the conversation, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Entrepreneurship Center at UNC have produced the first-ever Trends in Entrepreneurship Report. Combining data with expert analysis, the report gives timely insights into the topics that significantly affect entrepreneurs, funders, ecosystem partners, policymakers and others in the innovation economy.
The 2021 report explores the following: Initially, we explore the state of startups, small businesses and investments after a year – and global pandemic – have passed. Then we dive into one of the hottest areas today: health innovation. We highlight trends related to COVID-19, as well as other relevant topics, such as how AI and machine learning are impacting innovations in health. After that deep dive, we zoom out to explore broader trends related to investment structures, the impact of economic recovery funds distributed by the government, and other capital formation specific to entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Federal, state and local governments acted quickly to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, because the category of “small business” is defined so broadly, stimulus money did not always reach the intended recipients. The government’s definition of small business includes firms with fewer than 500 employees — which, taken together, represent a broad collection of different types of businesses with very different needs.
We introduce a new framework that facilitates term structure modeling with both positive interest rates and flexible time-series dynamics but that is also tractable, meaning amenable to quick and robust estimation. Using both simulations and U.S. historical data, we compare our approach with benchmark Gaussian, stochastic volatility, and shadow rate models, where the latter enforces positive interest rates.
Employees often engage in collective grassroot efforts to bring about gender equity in the workplace. Such coalition-based advocacy is largely driven by women, which has led to debate about whether men’s involvement as allies can help. Integrating literatures on signaling and legitimacy, we propose that the demographic composition of a gender equity advocacy coalition matters: Men-only groups lack coalition legitimacy, or the perception that they are the “right” spokespersons for gender equity issues, whereas women-only groups struggle to convey issue legitimacy, or the perception that gender equity is of strategic importance within business organizations.
Increased consumer demand for healthier product options and looming regulation have prompted many consumer goods brands to adjust the amount of sugar content in their product lines, including adding products with reduced sugar content or smaller package sizes. Even as brands adopt such practices, little guidance exists for how they should do so to protect or enhance their brand performance. This paper studies whether and when sugar reduction strategies affect sales.
Soda taxes are an increasingly popular policy tool, used to discourage purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages. This study analyzes how marketing conduct and its effectiveness might change after soda tax introductions. Prior studies on the effect of soda taxes focus on price increases but neglect other, managerially relevant marketing conduct tools, such as promotional frequency, promotional discount depth, and feature promotion frequency. This study documents how the marketing conduct and its effectiveness changed with the introduction of the tax across more than 200 retail stores in five markets.
This study uses passage of the Dodd-Frank Act as a setting to examine whether changes in legal liability exposure faced by credit rating agencies affect the number of financial statement information signals required before rating changes. For upgrades, we predict and find that the greater legal exposure after the Act incentivized rating agencies to require more information signals, i.e., a greater number of prior quarters in which upgrades were implied by financial statement information.
We coin the term credit market fluidity to describe the intensity of credit reallocation, whose properties and implications we study within the commercial loan market in France over the period 1998 through 2018. We base our analysis on credit register data and thus provide a more complete account of gross credit flows across and within bank loan portfolios.
How leaders can recast innovation's toughest trade-offs—efficiency vs. flexibility, consistency vs. change, product vs purpose—as productive tensions.
Using 391 high-skilled firm entries in the U.S. from 1990–2010, we estimate the effects of the firm entry on incumbent residents’ consumption, finances, and mobility. We compare outcomes for residents living close to the entry location with those living far away while controlling for their proximity to potential high-skilled firm entry sites.
Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees resembling out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to undiversifiable tail risk. We present a model in the context of the U.S. life insurance industry in which the regulatory framework incentivizes value-maximizing insurers to hedge variable annuity (VA) guarantees, though imperfectly, and shift risks into high-risk and illiquid bonds. We calibrate the model to insurer-level data and identify the VA-induced changes in insurers' risk exposures.
We document that there is commonality in the loan fees that short sellers pay, and the common component of loan fees explains a significant amount of loan fee variation. While the top principal component of stock returns only explains 28.3% of their variation, we find that the top principal component of loan fees explains 45.6% of their variation.