Public health surveillance systems routinely process massive volumes of data to identify health adverse events affecting the general population. Surveillance and response to foodborne disease suffers from a number of systemic and other delays that hinder early detection and confirmation of emerging contamination situations. In this paper we develop an answer set programming (ASP) application to assist public health officials in detecting an emerging foodborne disease outbreak by integrating and analyzing in near real-time temporally, spatially and symptomatically diverse data. These data can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting systems from regulatory agencies. We encode geographic ontologies in ASP to infer spatial relationships that may not be evident using traditional statistical tools. These technologies and ontologies have been implemented in a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis Tool (NCFEDA). The application was built to demonstrate the potential of situational awareness—created through real-time data fusion, analytics, visualization, and real-time communication—to reduce latency of response to foodborne disease outbreaks by North Carolina public health personnel.
In this paper we examine the prevalence of data, specification, and parameter uncertainty in the formation of simple rules that mimic monetary policymaking decisions. Our approach is to build real-time data sets and simulate a real-time policy-setting environment in which we assume that policy is captured by movements in the actual federal funds rate, and then to assess what sorts of policy rule models and what sorts of data best explain what the Federal Reserve actually did.
UNC’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Duke University Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) initiative have embarked on a joint initiative to build a data repository to facilitate empirical research in entrepreneurship.
Small businesses are an undeniable engine of growth for the United States, comprising 99 percent of all U.S. firms and driving nearly half our total economic activity. Yet small business owners across the country lack sufficient capital to succeed, grow and scale. The Kenan Institute has conducted a new analysis on the role of the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program in providing capital to the often-overlooked small businesses operating outside of metropolitan centers, as well as those owned by women and underrepresented minorities. You can access an overview of our findings, as well as key takeaways for business and policy leaders, by clicking below.
In response to the economic chaos caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government launched its largest fiscal stimulus in modern history—the CARES Act. But with $2 trillion invested in small businesses, unemployment benefits and direct cash payments to households, the CARES Act has still fallen short of its goals to spur consumer spending and restore employment. This Kenan Insight analyzes what went wrong, and offers suggestions for the anticipated next round of federal economic aid.
This article introduces a new data enrichment method that combines revealed data on consumer demand and competitive reactions with stated data on competitive reactions to yet-to-be-enacted, unprecedented marketing policy changes. The authors extend the data enrichment literature to include stated competitive reactions, collected from subject-matter experts through a conjoint experiment.
The paper introduces structured machine learning regressions for heavy-tailed dependent panel data potentially sampled at different frequencies. We focus on the sparse-group LASSO regularization. This type of regularization can take advantage of the mixed frequency time series panel data structures and improve the quality of the estimates.
A new, data-driven method of looking at regional economies in more detail will enable a richer discussion of the U.S. economy as a whole and provide forecasts for decision-makers in business and government.
On February 5, Odum Institute Assistant Director for Education and Qualitative Methods Paul Mihas introduced our Kenan Scholars to qualitative research methods and described resources available to them at the Odum Institute,
With homebuying season here, many Americans are eyeing the housing market, looking for signs of improvement. Will unfavorable conditions abate and the number of affordable homes begin to rise?
New Kenan Institute Research Economist Sarah Dickerson says that while her research and writing will help further the institute’s mission, "I also aim to expand the mission’s scope by reframing some of the fundamental questions being asked."
The dynamic procurement problem has long attracted academic and practitioner interest, and we solve it in an innovative data-driven way with proven theoretical guarantees. This work is also the first to leverage the power of covariate data in solving this problem.
We update an August 2023 piece in which we explain why manufacturing remains essential for economic growth and how manufacturing in the US today incorporates both regional shifts and “stickiness” in traditional strongholds.
From romance to finance and from the media to markets, data can help answer questions faster and provide critical insights to make smarter decisions. Data is power. Knowing how to read data can help identify patterns to end labor trafficking or to provide more affordable housing. Analyzing peaks and troughs can lead to game changing technological breakthroughs and new business opportunities. In the current error of ‘fake news’, how confident are you in your ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data and assess facts? Join us at this interactive session and learn just how data literate you are.
As federal, state and local governments struggle to reopen the economy as the COVID-19 pandemic surges onward, efforts to ensure people’s health and safety are seemingly at odds with attempts to spur economic activity. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how a data-driven approach to reopening North Carolina (and the U.S. as a whole) can help preserve both lives and livelihoods.
Macroeconomic data are typically subject to future revisions and released with delay. Predictive return regressions using such data therefore potentially overstate the information set available to investors in real time.
The Private Equity Research Consortium this fall plans to make fund holdings data available for academic research—a development that helps mark the 10-year partnership between data provider Burgiss and the Institute for Private Capital, an affiliate of UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
Does the quality of startups increase when the quantity drops? Does entrepreneurial experience help or hurt a corporate job candidate? Do diverse teams make for better startups? The 2022 Trends in Entrepreneurship report brings together our global network of affiliated experts to address these questions and more – with key findings highlighted in this week’s insight.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has been a recurring theme throughout the 2020 U.S. elections, and its health and economic consequences will be felt far beyond November 3. In this Kenan Insight, we look at both the challenges and potential opportunities the pandemic has created for accelerating innovations in healthcare delivery and pharmaceutical development.
We analyze and assess longitudinal data on startups from two data sources – the National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) database and the Secretary of State (SOS) business registry data. Our primary purposes in this paper are to assess the usefulness and reliability of these databases in measuring startup activity along several quality indicators and to explore the possibility of integrating these large databases using both automated and manual processes.