We examine the role of political affiliation during the selection of Opportunity Zones, a place-based tax incentive enacted by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. We find governors are on average 7.6% more likely to select a census tract as an Opportunity Zone when the tract’s state representative is a member of the governor’s political party. This effect is incremental to local demographic factors that increased the likelihood of selection, such as lower income levels and preceding improvements in local conditions.
How does sentiment in a pitch affect an entrepreneur’s fundraising outcomes? Although research suggests that negativity in entrepreneurial “pitches” to investors adversely impacts resource acquisition, there is a lack of empirical research showing whether, and to what extent, this is true. We study over 30,000 entrepreneurial loan requests from one of the largest loan marketplaces to understand how the sentiment in text-only pitches to investors affects fundraising. In contrast to prior literature, we find that negatively-worded pitches are funded faster than positively-worded ones.
As of 2019, salary history bans were enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws using a large panel dataset of disaggregated wages covering all public-sector employees in 36 states and find, on average, that salary history bans lead to a 3% decrease in new-hire wages.
Common wisdom suggests that when it comes to launching a startup, you need co-founders. But a new study finds that solo founders can in fact be successful — if they have the support of co-creators. Co-creators are individuals or organizations that play a critical role in helping a founder build their business, but without receiving the control or equity of a formal co-founder.
The Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise hosted a candid discussion regarding the effects of COVID-19 on universities and what a return to campus might look like, including the inevitable complications. Experts addressed special research findings from two surveys of university presidents, the quantification of potential financial impact of COVID-19 on higher ed and presented scenarios and related strategic options. This webinar featured UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor & Co-founder of ABC Insights Paul Friga, Ph.D., Chronicle of Higher Education Senior Writer Scott Carlson, Association of American Colleges & Universities President Lynn Pasquarella, Ph.D. and rpk GROUP Founder & Senior Partner Rick Staisloff.
A BloombergView article on the negative economic effects of the growing number of mega companies dominating American markets features the latest research co-authored by Kenan Institute Director Greg Brown. The research looks at how the dramatic change in the number and composition of firms listed on major U.S. exchanges over the past two decades – namely, more larger, older companies and fewer companies overall – has resulted in historically low levels of idiosyncratic risk.
Policies that require, or recommend, disclosure of corporate tax information are becoming more common throughout the world, as are examples of tax-related information increasingly influencing public policy and perceptions. In addition, companies are increasing the voluntary provision of tax-related information. We describe those trends and place them within a taxonomy of public and private tax disclosure.
We examine whether firms hold more cash in the face of tax uncertainty. Because of gray areas in the tax law and aggressive tax avoidance, the total amount of tax that a firm will pay is uncertain at the time it files its returns. The tax authorities can challenge and disallow the firm’s tax positions, demanding additional cash tax payments.
Few papers in the literature on inequality measurement deal with uncertainty, particularly when the ranking of cohorts may not be fixed. We present a set of axioms implying such a class of inequality measures under uncertainty that is a one-parameter extension of the generalized Gini mean over the distribution of average allocations. The extension consists of a quadratic term accounting for inter-personal correlations. In particular, our measure can simultaneously accommodate a preference for “shared destiny”, a preference for probabilistic mixtures over unfair allocations, and a preference for fairness “for sure” over fairness in expectation.
We show that firms’ ability to avoid taxes is affected by the quality of their internal information environment, with lower effective tax rates (ETRs) for firms that have high internal information quality. The effect of internal information quality on tax avoidance is stronger for firms in which information is likely to play a more important role.
Individuals tend to give losses approximately 2-fold the weight that they give gains. Such approximations of loss aversion (LA) are almost always measured in the stimulus domain of money, rather than objects or pictures. Recent work on preference-based decision-making with a schedule-less keypress task (relative preference theory, RPT) has provided a mathematical formulation for LA similar to that in prospect theory (PT), but makes no parametric assumptions in the computation of LA, uses a variable tied to communication theory (i.e., the Shannon entropy or information), and works readily with non-monetary stimuli.
There is widespread concern about whether Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are appropriately punished for poor performance. While CEOs are more likely to be forced out if their performance is poor relative to the industry average, overall industry performance also matters.
Life financial outcomes carry a significant heritable component, but the mechanisms by which genes influence financial choices remain unclear. Focusing on a polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), we found that individuals possessing the short allele of this gene invested less in equities, were less engaged in actively making investment decisions, and had fewer credit lines.
We directly test the reliability and relevance of investee fair values reported by listed private equity funds (LPEs). In our setting, disaggregated fair value measurements are observable for funds’ investees; and investee accounting fundamentals are also publicly disclosed. We find that LPE fair value measurements reflect equity book value and net income in a manner consistent with stock market pricing of listed companies.
Do founders actually assimilate and leverage the knowledge from the seasoned executives who surround them? Or do they shrug it off and march to the beat of their own drum? To better understand whether founder CEOs incorporate or ignore advice from their leadership team, we collected and analyzed data on more than 2,000 companies that went public from 1997 to 2013, roughly half of which were led by founders and the other half by hired (nonfounder) CEOs.
How leaders can recast innovation's toughest trade-offs—efficiency vs. flexibility, consistency vs. change, product vs purpose—as productive tensions.
Hurricane Ian destroyed property and disrupted livelihoods in some of Florida’s largest and most rapidly growing coastal and inland counties.
In this paper, we develop new methods for analyzing high-dimensional tensor datasets. A tensor factor model describes a high-dimensional dataset as a sum of a low-rank component and an idiosyncratic noise, generalizing traditional factor models for panel data. We propose an estimation algorithm, called tensor principal component analysis (PCA), which generalizes the traditional PCA applicable to panel data.
In kicking off the new year, we at the Kenan Institute want to highlight five topics we anticipate will be top of mind for business leaders and policymakers during the 12 months ahead. Although some of these challenges – such as the recession we expect – can be painful, they also present opportunities. To help you navigate this rapidly evolving economic landscape, the Kenan Institute will work to provide solutions-focused analysis on the following as well as related issues throughout 2023.