The North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA) commissioned a study to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its efforts to combat poverty and facilitate self-sufficiency in low-income communities throughout the state. We conducted focus groups with individuals served by Community Action Agencies (CAAs) and conducted a corresponding set of key informant interviews with identified leaders in five communities across the state. The research focused on five themes. We generated eight key takeaways from our content analysis of the focus group transcripts and nine key takeaways from our content analysis of the transcripts emanating from our Zoom sessions with community key informants.
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,
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 exemplifies a worst-case scenario for federal, state, and local disaster preparedness planning and illustrates some of the United States’ fundamental public health infrastructure flaws. While stay-at-home orders and economic shutdowns initially depressed disease spread, they harmed businesses and organizations, threatened individuals’ livelihoods, and negatively impacted community well-being. National standards for COVID-19 management tools and protocols were not available when needed, and state, local, and federal guidance differed, and often conflicted, in ways that confused the public and created economic uncertainty.
Community banks are the central financial institution in many places. They have the capacity to alleviate credit constraints of small firms. This may increase economic resilience, delaying or mitigating the effects of the Great Recession. We estimate how the county-level banking access and community bank market share affect both the timing and duration of the Great Recession. Using the Cox Proportional Hazards Model, we find that communities with a higher community bank market share are either less likely to experience recession conditions, or experience these conditions later. Using the Heckman Selection model, we confirm these results, and show that communities with a higher community bank market share are less likely to experience recession conditions. This research provides the first link between local financial institutions, and economic resilience.
Co-hosted by the North Carolina Office of the US Economic Development Administration and the North Carolina Outdoor Recreation Industry Office at the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, NCGrowth’s Blueway Guide provides communities the tools they need to leverage waterways for economic development and increased quality of life. Speakers will include outdoor industry businesses, economic development professionals and community leaders.
The arrival of two approved COVID-19 vaccines provides a clear path to the end of the pandemic that held most of 2020 hostage. But a recent resurgence of the virus and skyrocketing rates of infection indicate that a full return to normalcy—including the pre-pandemic work environment— is still months in the future. In this Kenan Insight, we examine the relevant factors that will determine when and how we go back to the office.
Higher education is in crisis and its leaders are handicapped by a lack of reliable data. We are entering an era that will require more informed decision making in higher education and unfortunately the underlying data, especially benchmarking performance information, do not exist to support such strategic thinking and change.
The evidence concerning high deductible health plans (HDHPs) suggests three key patterns involving people with diabetes...
The challenge for public health officials is to detect an emerging foodborne disease outbreak from a large set of simple and isolated, domain-specific events. These events 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. In this paper we formalize a foodborne disease outbreak as a complex event and apply an event-driven rule-based engine to the problem of detecting emerging events. We define an evidence set as a set of simple events that are linked symptomatically, spatially and temporally. A weighted metric is used to compute the strength of the evidence set as a basis for response by public health officials.
More than 400 academic researchers, private sector executives, public policy leaders and students convened at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School on Friday, Nov. 9, for Business of Health: Collaborating to Rethink Healthcare.
Recent health policy efforts have attempted to promote constructive conversations regarding cost-effectiveness by increasing transparency for both patients and physicians. Spurred by access and cost challenges resulting from increasing pharmaceutical prices, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule that would require direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements to include the list price for a typical 30-day course of therapy, according to their weighted average cost. This Viewpoint discusses implementing price transparency for health care products and services where physicians spend an increasing proportion of their time—in electronic health records (EHRs).
Experts from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) met with bankers and investors to shed light on the unique challenges and advantages of investing in two federal government programs designed to infuse capital into small and rural businesses at the Community Development Investment Workshop on Wednesday, Oct. 17, at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill.
The Anchor Institutions Create Economic Resilience (AICER) initiative seeks to stimulate distressed economies through anchor institution-community partnerships.
Unemployment insurance has been a lifeline for millions of Americans who have found themselves out of work in the wake of the economic shutdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. But with federal, state and local government coffers strained, the time has come for short-time compensation (STC) and partial unemployment insurance programs to receive a closer look. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how these little-known initiatives can benefit both employees and employers and provide relief to an ailing U.S. economy.
The Research Triangle and the Piedmont Triad epitomize North Carolina’s economic evolution. The Triangle transitioned from legacy industries to high-tech manufacturing and experienced explosive economic growth; the Triad may be poised to join it.
In this paper we present a framework for linking smart products (with embedded real-time diagnostics and prognostics based health management capabilities) to a service provisioning system to create a system of ―self-aware product-centric systems. The framework includes a powerful ―learning engine capable of monitoring, analyzing and interpreting patterns of system/product behavior in real-time. The learning engine provides the capability of information feedback for real-time, ―in-the-loop control. This concept enables the service-provisioning network to provide customer services such as product health management at reduced maintenance costs, improved responsiveness to customer needs during use, and generally more efficient operations.
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.
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.
A panel of experts convened by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, its affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Institute of African American Research will offer a press briefing via webinar on the intersection of the COVID-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement—providing a framework for developing solutions to achieve equitable public health and economic outcomes for the short- and long-term.
Unethical behavior deeply embedded within an organization can affect employee morale and impact bigger issues, such as performance, turnover, and healthcare and legal costs.