Firms initiating broad-based employee share ownership plans often claim employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) increase productivity by improving employee incentives. Do they? Small ESOPs comprising less than 5% of shares, granted by firms with moderate employee size, increase the economic pie, benefiting both employees and shareholders. The effects are weaker when there are too many employees to mitigate free-riding.
Times are tough for universities. Leaders on campus are facing more pressure than ever – strategic, operational, and financial. How do we manage our administrative functions efficiently to free up resources for our core dual mission of teaching and research?
The Kenan Institute’s deep dive into stakeholder capitalism has exposed shortcomings in a key building block: ESG measurement. Our experts have explored the issue at length, proposing ways of refining these measures to produce structures that could meet the needs of multiple stakeholders while also working to design reporting free from political influence and agendas. As a next step, the Kenan Institute hosted a conversation featuring a business leader, investor and standard setter to discuss how we might turn these ideas into solutions to help integrate stakeholder capitalism principals into business and investment decisions.
We recently introduced a research program on how firms can effectively capture fleeting opportunities using heuristics. Heuristics, we advocate, are the essence of strategy, especially in unpredictable markets where opportunities are often numerous, fast moving, and uncertain. Our emphasis on heuristics invites comparison with prominent research programs in cognitive psychology. We address this opportunity by comparing our “simple rules” heuristics approach with “heuristics-and-biases” and “fast-and-frugal” heuristics research. Collectively, the three approaches offer a rich understanding of heuristics.
Sexual health campaigns are often designed “top-down” by public health experts, failing to engage key populations. Using the power of crowdsourcing to shape a “bottom-up” approach, this note describes 2 creative contributory contests to enhance sexual health campaigns. We provide guidance for designing creative contributory contests to improve HIV and other sexually transmitted disease testing.
We consider the allocation of inventory to stores in a “merchandise test,” whereby a fashion retailer deploys a new product to stores in limited quantities in order to learn about demand prior to the main selling season. Our problem formulation includes practical considerations like fixed costs and multiperiod inventory considerations but is challenging to analyze directly. Instead, we take a bounding approach that isolates the novel aspect of our problem: the impact of test inventory allocation on demand learning.
In this paper, we empirically examine differences in subprime borrower default decisions by Census tract characteristics in order to clarify how the subprime foreclosure crisis played out in minority areas. An innovation in our modeling approach is that we do not constrain the impact of neighborhood composition to be identical across diverse decision-making settings.
Strategic alliances are undertaken to create value through complementarities of resources and capabilities of the partner firms. This paper uses a recently developed estimator of matching games, i.e., the maximum score estimator, to advance strategic management research on partner selection in strategic alliances, with a focus on the formation of research alliances in the biopharmaceutical industry.
A retailer cannot sell more than it has in stock; therefore, its sales observations are a censored representation of the underlying demand process. When a retailer forecasts demand based on past sales observations, it requires an estimation approach that accounts for this censoring. Several authors have analyzed inventory management with demand learning in environments with censored observations, but the authors assume that inventory levels are known and hence that stockouts are observed.
Does the way that individuals pay for a good or service influence the amount of connection they feel after the purchase has occurred? Employing a multi-method approach across four studies, individuals who pay using a relatively more painful form of payment (e.g., cash or check) increase their post-transaction connection to the product they purchased and/or the organization their purchase supports in comparison to those who pay with less painful forms of payment (e.g., debit or credit card).
This research takes a new perspective on the longstanding mystery of personality in negotiation, which has been met with decades of null and inconsistent findings. Grounded in interactionist theories of personality, the investigation had two complementary phases.
Using an integrative approach, the authors incorporate the four mechanisms in their empirical model specification. Specifically, to model the interplay among CSR, CSI, and firm performance and to test the four mechanisms simultaneously, they propose a structural panel vector autoregression specification.
Marketing activities that influence shoppers along the various stages of their path-to-purchase are gaining attention from both manufacturers and retailers. Using a dataset with detailed information on 105 new products (NPs) launched in the U.K. by 44 leading brands and sold across 13 major retail banners, we provide strong support for the prominent role of both upper- and lower-funnel marketing actions that influence consumers before (upper) or during (lower) their shopping trip.
We explore the theoretical relation between earnings and market returns as well as the properties of earnings frequency distributions under the assumption that managers use unbiased accounting information to sequentially decide on real options their firms have and report generated earnings truthfully, with the market pricing the firm based on those reported earnings. We generate benchmarks against which empirically observed earnings‐returns relations and aggregate earnings distributions can be evaluated.
From research to teaching to community, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Associate Professor Mahka Moeen always has an eye on innovation and creative adaptation. Learn about her inspired – and inspiring – approach to her work in this recent article.
Mark Little, executive director of CREATE, was recently profiled in an article by Rice University, his alma mater. The article highlights Little’s varied career and collaborative approach to his work.
Research Director Christian Lundblad explores the implications of a long-brewing skills mismatch for companies’ bottom lines and our approach to combatting income inequality.
In this week’s data commentary we’ll provide our usual review of health statistics, but primarily focus on what is an increasingly perilous juncture for both the U.S. and North Carolina economies. Specifically, the failure of Congress to agree on a new stimulus plan is feeling more and more like a game of chicken, with U.S. households standing between the onrushing vehicles. Hopefully, there is still time to slam the brakes on the rhetoric and approach the problem with solid economic logic.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the movement toward globalization that has benefited investors since the end of the Cold War. This development, combined with inflationary pressures not seen in three decades, should prompt individual and institutional investors to reconsider their approach to managing their money, Director of Research Christian Lundblad recently shared with the Raleigh News & Observer.
Students from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, in partnership with UNC's Program for Public Discourse, will gather to address the opportunities and risks of an environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG)-centered approach to financial decision-making.