The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) allowed for the creation of Opportunity Zones (OZs) — specially designated census tracts encompassing low-income neighborhoods meant to stimulate investment through large tax incentives. But critics say the program has not spurred additional investment as much as rewarded politically connected investors. In this Kenan Insight, we investigate what role, if any, bias and political party affiliation plays in the selection of OZs.
Pete Stavros of KKR & Co. founded Ownership Works, a new initiative backed by 19 private equity firms, with the objective of reducing income inequality by increasing employee share ownership. The group has prominent backers and a lofty goal of creating $20 billion in wealth in 10 years. As a researcher who has worked on employee share ownership and the benefits it can create, I was encouraged by the news. But while I broadly support employee ownership, such initiatives also can raise red flags because of the risk they impose on employees. As such, it is worthwhile to think carefully through what we know and don’t know about such programs.
...ESG: What We’ve Learned from Our Partners For our 2022 grand challenge, the Kenan Institute made the ambitious commitment to explore stakeholder capitalism and ESG investing – complex topics that...
In addition to academic presentations, the Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality took participants out of the classroom and into the community for a walking tour and on-site discussions in nearby Durham, N.C.
This year Rethinc. Labs joined the Duke Quantum Center and the IBM Quantum Hub at NC State to bring their Financial Services focus to the Triangle Quantum Computing Seminar Series. We will welcome João Doriguello, from the National University of Singapore to share his least squares Monte Carolo algorithm.
By almost any measure, marketing academia is in a better shape than it has ever been. Job prospects for PhD students have improved substantially in recent years. According to the 2017 Marketing Academia Labor Report, there were 1.83 candidates per new assistant professor (“rookie”) position compared to 2.85 to 1 in 2010. Moreover, there are 37 open positions for advanced assistant professors with only 14 people looking for such positions. The median 12-month salary for entry-level positions is $190,000, up from $162,260 in 2010. Colleagues in the School of Arts & Sciences, as well as most people in the government or private sector, would gladly enjoy such opportunities.
This paper seeks to improve our understanding of how intermediaries operate to advance the commercialization of science by providing a set of specialized services. We review five intermediaries commonly mentioned in the ecosystem literature: university technology transfer and licensing offices; physical space (incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces); professional services providers; networking, connecting, and assisting organizations; and finance providers (including venture capital, angel investors, public financing, and crowdfunding).
Combining a Monte Carlo simulation with a statistical model of player skill and random variation in scoring, we estimate the seeding and selection efficiency of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup, a very complex multi-stage golf competition, which distributes $35 million in prize money, including $10 million to the winner.
Customer review manipulation is a common strategy employed by sellers of online marketplaces to combat competitors. The impact of this deceptive behavior on the competitive pricing of online marketplaces is intricate. First, buying fake reviews incurs additional costs and alters customer demand in competitive settings by misrepresenting product information. Second, the pricing is determined through internal competitions, where sellers compete with each other within an online marketplace. This is because the winner's price is the default price displayed to customers, representing the price of the online marketplace. Meanwhile, online marketplaces also effectively manage prices in order to stay competitive in external competition against multi-channel retailers, further complicating this problem. To unravel this influence mechanism, we build instrumented econometric models and develop a game-theoretic model to empirically and theoretically analyze this influence mechanism in the context of internal and external competitions, respectively.
Over 1960 to 2017, we show that a positive risk premium from holding high-beta stocks (versus low-beta stocks) and small-cap stocks (versus large-cap stocks) is reliably earned only after the expected stock-market volatility breaches an approximate top-quintile threshold. The high conditional average returns with this nonlinear risk-return phenomenon are persistently evident over months t+1 to t+6 following a volatility-threshold breach in month t-1.
We examine the effects of an annual government social safety net payment on crime by leveraging geographic and intertemporal variation in the magnitude and timing of earned income tax credit (EITC) payments, combined with crime micro-data.
For someone so young, Nick Black (Kenan-Flagler MBA ’13) has racked up more accolades than many people twice his age: Kenan Institute Leadership Fellow (precursor to the current Kenan Scholars program), Rollie Tillman Leadership Award, and Presidential Leadership Scholar, not to mention the numerous medals he won as a member of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team.
This paper presents the development, validation, and implementation of a data-driven optimization model designed to dynamically plan the assignment of anesthesiologists across multiple hospital locations within a large multi-specialty healthcare system. We formulate the problem as a multi-stage robust mixed-integer program incorporating on-call flexibility to address demand uncertainty. The optimized dynamic staffing plan has been successfully implemented in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center healthcare system, leading to estimated annual cost savings of 12\% compared to current practice, or about \$800,000 annually.
PERC returns to Oxford University’s Saïd Business School on May 11-12, 2023, for the Private Equity Research Consortium Spring Symposium. This group of scholars and industry professionals conducts and promotes research on private equity.
PERC returns to Oxford University’s Saïd Business School on May 16-17, 2024 for the Private Equity Research Consortium Oxford Research Symposium.
On April 1-2, 2016, the Energy Center at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill convened a conference on “Global Frac’ing, What has to Change for it to be a Game Changer?” It was an invitation only event with attendance limited to industry experts, leading consultants and responsible government officials. Attendees and speakers came from the U.S., UK, Poland, Mexico and Canada. This report summarizes the main points which emerged from the speaker presentations and subsequent discussion. It does not attempt to be a comprehensive treatment of Global Frac’ing. Rather, it raises four sets of questions and presents the conclusions which developed. The Executive Summary provides an overview of these conclusions. The appendices share details on two matters much discussed – what would be a model regulatory regime for unconventional development, and what would constitute a model fiscal regime?
Philanthropy by entrepreneurs remains an empirically underexplored topic. Combining datasets on U.S. based IPOs with individual philanthropic gifts, we empirically demonstrate that entrepreneurial harvests indeed trigger entrepreneurs’ philanthropic behavior. Furthermore, we distinguish how entrepreneurs’ approach to philanthropy differs from other individuals who experience the same wealth creating event. Entrepreneurs are able to transition more quickly to philanthropy compared to non-entrepreneurs, are more likely to invest in university science and technology, and also provide a greater number of gifts.
Postdoctoral scholars may be economic complements or substitutes for faculty, doctoral research assistants and capital in the production of university life science research. Using data on 120 US universities, we present two cross-sectional (1993 and 2006) descriptive econometric models. Results suggest that postdocs serve primarily as complements to other labour inputs and capital.
State initiatives that build innovation capacity by supporting local academic research, attracting eminent scholars, and building research excellence have become prominent among the 50 states over the past 30 years. This article focuses on three programs: University Research Grants, Eminent Scholars, and Centers of Excellence.
This study explores the process of organizational change by examining localized social learning in organizational subunits. Specifically, we examine participation in university technology transfer, a new organizational initiative, by tracking 1,780 faculty members, examining their backgrounds and work environments, and following their engagement with academic entrepreneurship.