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.
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.
Formal theory and empirical research are complementary in building and advancing the body of knowledge in accounting in order to understand real-world phenomena. We offer thoughts on opportunities for empiricists and theorists to collaborate, build on each other’s work, and iterate over models and data to make progress.
We examine the interplay of behavioral and environmental uncertainty in shaping the effectiveness of two key governance mechanisms used by strategic alliances: contractual and trust-based governance. We develop and test hypotheses, using a meta-analytic dataset encompassing over 15,000 strategic alliances across 82 independent samples. We find that contractual governance works best under low to moderate levels of behavioral uncertainty and moderate to high levels of environmental uncertainty, while it is detrimental to alliance performance when both types of uncertainty are low or high.
Like anyone trying to get something done with limited time and resources, economic developers have a lot of options to weigh when formulating a strategy to attract and retain businesses in their local economy. Over the years, economic development researchers have espoused a succession of theories as they’ve learned more about the many factors that influence economic growth. Historically, practitioners have tended to respond by focusing their efforts around what they perceive as the latest and greatest thinking, often at the expense of previously favored approaches. In practice, this has led to waves in which economic developers have focused on recruiting large, established companies or on fostering home-grown start-ups—but rarely both.
The 12th annual Alternative Investments Conference, hosted by the Institute for Private Capital and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, was previewed in a WRAL TechWire article on March 27. The conference will cover the latest themes and trends in private equity, hedge funds, real assets, venture capital and other alternative investment types.
Commercial real estate is a major asset class, with an estimated value of more than $12 trillion in the U.S. alone. But the stay-at-home orders and business closures precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to negatively – and disastrously – affect commercial properties. What will the short- and long-term impacts be, which types of properties will be hardest hit and what policies can be put in place to help stem the tide of losses? UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor and Leonard W. Wood Center for Real Estate Studies Faculty Advisor Andra Ghent and her colleagues examine these issues in this week’s Kenan Insight.
American Indian communities face a growing housing crisis, compounding long-standing social and economic challenges. In this Kenan Insight, we examine the structural and historic factors that underlie the current lack of affordable housing, and identify several promising options for both addressing the immediate crisis and improving the broader economic situation for tribal communities.
Toyota announced a plan to build its first North American battery manufacturing plant in Randolph County, North Carolina — a $1.272 billion project that’s expected to bring up to 3,000 jobs – in 2025. Kenan Institute Chief Economist Gerald Cohen said the investment will be beneficial for the region and state, citing the “network effects” these types of facilities can create.
The increasingly open flow of goods and services has fundamentally altered the world economy and global power balances. It is also reshaping the American political system and our economic geography, providing clear and lasting benefits for some and negative impacts for others. This conference convenes thought leaders from the business community, government and academia to explore the core questions of the impact of international trade on society, the changing nature of work and economic productivity.
Although weather has been shown to affect financial markets and financial decision making, a still open question is the channel through which such influence is exerted. By employing a multiple price list method, this paper provides direct experimental evidence that sunshine and good weather promote risk-taking behavior.
We document differences in human capital deployment between diversified and focused firms. We find that diversified firms have higher labor productivity and that they redeploy labor to industries with better prospects in response to changing opportunities. The opportunities and incentives provided in internal labor markets in turn affect the development of workers' human capital. We find that workers more frequently transition to other industries in which their diversified firms operate and with smaller wage losses than workers in the open market, even when they leave their original firms. Overall, internal labor markets provide a bright side to corporate diversification.
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.
In most sectors of the economy, competition is regarded as the way to improve quality and efficiency, lower costs, and increase innovations. Whether competition effectively achieves these improvements in health care, particularly with respect to hospital services, which remains the largest sector of spending for health care, is open to debate. Also debated, at least among some physicians, is whether functionally banning new physician-owned hospitals by prohibiting their participation in Medicare under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was too blunt an instrument to correct a problem that could have been fixed with a more nuanced regulatory solution, needlessly limiting a potential source of competition for hospital services.
As North Carolina's entrepreneurs, industries and communities move forward amidst COVID-19, Kenan Institute affiliated center NCGrowth is helping to make sure they have the tools to succeed when business can fully re-open again.
Director of Research Christian Lundblad and Professor Paige Ouimet examine why some businesses are struggling to fill open positions amid the economic recovery.
Federal, state and local governments worked hard to sustain entrepreneurial ecosystems, and especially small businesses, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these programs were successful in helping businesses stay open during desperate times.
UNC Kenan-Flagler's Camelia Kuhnen discusses the possibilities of open banking with Duke Fuqua's Manju Puri.
The Institute for Private Capital improves public understanding of the role of private capital in the global economy. Academic and industry experts work together to generate new knowledge about private capital markets based on objective academic research.
The Institute for Private Capital improves public understanding of the role of private capital in the global economy. Academic and industry experts work together to generate new knowledge about private capital markets based on objective academic research.