Our 2023 Frontiers of Business Conference will convene corporate executives, top researchers and policy leaders to share objective, evidence-based solutions for navigating the precarious road toward a labor market equilibrium. Learn more today.
As the digital revolution rages on, every business leader must become technology literate. This guide provides executives with an introduction to the technologies that are transforming our world.
To increase revenue or improve customer service, companies are increasingly personalizing their product or service offerings based on their customers' history of interactions. In this paper, we show how call centers can improve customer service by implementing personalized priority policies.
We propose a new theory of systemic risk based on Knightian uncertainty (“ambiguity”). Because of uncertainty aversion, bad news on one asset class worsens investors’ expectations on other asset classes, so that idiosyncratic risk creates contagion, snowballing into systemic risk.
Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that the wealthier have better life and property insurance coverage.
Join us to hear from Seth Lloyd, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Physics at MIT, as he shares his findings on quantum algorithms for analyzing financial data and predicting time series
Despite encouraging signs, India’s retail market remains largely off-limits to large international retailers like Wal-Mart and Carrefour. Opposition to liberalizing FDI in this sector raises concerns about employment losses, unfair competition resulting in the large-scale exit of incumbent domestic retailers, and infant industry arguments to protect the organized domestic retail sector that is at a nascent stage. Based on international evidence, we suggest that allowing entry by large international retailers into the Indian market may help tackle inflation, especially in food prices.
For more information, contact Dr. Kim Allen at Kim_Allen@kenan-flagler.unc.edu.
Following 2 decades of discussion, the border adjustment tax (BAT) briefly emerged as part of proposed US corporate tax reform in early 2017. While heavily debated, little empirical evidence exists regarding the BAT. We take advantage of the period during which the BAT was under strong consideration to examine its effects on shareholder value.
In recent years, the importance of reducing wealth inequality and spurring inclusive economic growth has become apparent. Most approaches to reducing wealth inequality have been on the policy side, for example, through changing taxation. But economic prosperity can also occur for people in the lower half of the wealth distribution through market-based actions. The business sector has innovated and found profitable opportunities by serving lower income or lower wealth communities — for example, fintech or telehealth are two domains in which for-profit businesses have created opportunities for those in more disadvantaged situations to improve their well-being, including their finances.
Customer reviews are essential to online marketplaces. However, reviews typically vary; ratings of a product or service are rarely the same. In many service marketplaces, including the ones for solar panel installations, supply-side participants are active. That is, a seller must make a proposal to serve each customer. In such marketplaces, it is not clear how (or if) the dispersion in customer reviews affects the seller activity level and number of matches in the marketplace. Our paper examines this by considering both ratings and text reviews.
AI has become close to bewildering in its promises, met and unmet, its terms and tools, acronyms, “use” case examples of wild successes countered by duds and disappointments. There’s an overall lack of clear pointers for business leaders to shape the direction, priorities and pace of their organization’s AI activities. Over the past two years, we have explored the widening AI space; what stood out in our reviews is that there is today a lack of management perspective on AI.
For more information, contact Phil Hardy at: Phil_Hardy@kenan-flagler.unc.edu.
We quantify the immediate net effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) on the tax burden of corporate profits for public US corporations.
In this paper, we provide a theoretical and empirical framework that allows us to synthesize and assess the burgeoning literature on CEO overconfidence. We also provide novel empirical evidence that overconfidence matters for corporate investment decisions in a framework that explicitly addresses the endogeneity of firms' financing constraints.
Using a sample of the 48 contiguous United States, we consider the problem of forecasting state and local governments’ revenues and expenditures in real time using models that feature mixed-frequency data. We find that single-equation mixeddata sampling (MIDAS) regressions that predict low-frequency fiscal outcomes using high-frequency economic data historically outperform both traditional fiscal forecasting models and theoretically motivated multi-equation models.
We use US Census administrative data to document important facts about wages at entrepreneurial firms. As in earlier studies, we confirm lower average wages at new firms. However, nearly two thirds of this decline can be attributed to differences in worker quality at new firms. Moreover, once we control for firm fixed effects, absorbing time invariant firm quality, the wage difference between new and established firms further declines.
In this paper, we seek to better understand how executives can intelligently combine modular and integrated problem solving processes to form the best possible strategy in entrepreneurial environments. To do so, we compare the efficacy of strategies formed via different processes under various market conditions, exploring the sources of significant performance differences. We address this question using NK simulation methods.
Extant literature highlights the importance of specific choices such as pricing and particular strategieslike “get big fast” for strategy in two-sided markets. Yet it leaves open how executives form a viable strategy in entrepreneurial settings, particularly when buyers, sellers, and product may be uncertain. With an inductive case study of 8 two-sided marketplace ventures in multiple industries, we developa theoretical framework that describes how entrepreneurs address this challenge: by focusing on successive strategic domains, beginning with supply.
The rapid growth in the adoption of mobile payments has already begun to reshape bank payment practices. Utilizing a unique data set from a leading bank in Asia that records credit card transactions of its customers before and after the launch of Alipay mobile payment, the largest mobile payment platform in the world, this study aims to understand the impact of mobile payment adoption on bank customer credit card activities and the change of this impact after the mobile payment expansion.