What’s best for a local economy—recruiting big, established companies, or nurturing home-grown startups? It’s a question economic developers and researchers have grappled with for decades. In a new white paper and Economic Development Quarterly article, Kenan Institute Senior Faculty Fellow Maryann Feldman and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Nichola Lowe offer a new tack: Try both.
We study the dynamics of pricing efficiency in the equity REIT market from 1993 to 2014. We measure pricing efficiency at the firm level using variance ratios calculated from quote midpoints in the TAQ database.
Using a dataset of 3,234 letters sent by 434 hedge funds to their investors during 1995–2011, we study what motivates hedge fund managers to make voluntary disclosures. Contrary to the hedge fund industry's reputation for opacity, we observe that managers provide their investors with an array of quantitative and qualitative information about fund returns, risk exposures, holdings, benchmarks, performance attribution, and future prospects.
The Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, in partnership with Infinia ML, an advanced machine learning company that delivers transformative automation solutions and data science to enterprise businesses, will host a cross-sector symposium on Friday, Nov. 30 to advance the field of machine learning. Academic and business leaders will come together with students to connect the possibilities of cutting-edge ML research with the realities of practical implementation.
One of the most significant empirical findings of the behavioral finance literature is that investor sentiment affects asset prices. Baker and Wurgler (2006) finds that shares of certain firms — those that are difficult to value — are more affected by shifts in investor sentiment. We examine whether the accounting information of firms that are inherently difficult to value can mitigate sentiment-related mispricing. Our findings indicate that sentiment-related mispricing is in fact diminished in the subset of firms with high-quality accounting information.
Fifteen students from Kenan-Flagler Business School have been selected as members of the third class of undergraduate Kenan Scholars. The two-and-half-year program, sponsored by the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, brings together business school majors and minors who have exhibited outstanding leadership on campus and in the community.
The United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) has named Ted Zoller a Justin G. Longenecker Fellow. Zoller, T.W. Lewis Clinical Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and director of the Kenan Institute-affiliated Entrepreneurship Center, was inducted into the fellowship on Jan. 25 at the USASBE’s annual conference in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Although private credit funds have rapidly grown into a standalone asset class over the last decade, little is known about the aggregate performance of these funds. To provide a first look at absolute and relative performance, we utilize the Burgiss database of 476 private credit funds with nearly $480 billion in committed capital, including a subset of 155 direct lending funds.
On January 31 and February 1, 2019, the Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise (Kenan Institute) hosted its Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Conference at The Breakers Palm Beach Resort. The conference brought together more than 150 academic research scholars, policy experts and private sector professionals to discuss and debate the most challenging current issues in the field of entrepreneurship in order to set the agenda for future research and policy.
This study examines whether key characteristics of analysts’ forecasts—timeliness, accuracy, and informativeness—change when investor demand for information is likely to be especially high, i.e., during periods of high uncertainty. Findings reveal that when uncertainty is high, analysts’ forecasts are more timely but less accurate. However, analysts’ forecasts are also more informative to the market, which is consistent with investors’ demand for timely information, even if it is less accurate.
In honor of tax season, UNC Tax Center Associate Director Courtney Edwards shares how the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affected her personal tax liability as an example of some of the ways in which reform may have altered your returns as well.
Cardiovascular disease has become a leading cause of death for patients with paraplegia. Acute myocardial infarction in patients with paraplegia has not been described in the literature. This study investigates clinical features, management strategies, and outcomes of these patients.
We study how an improvement in contracting institutions due to the 1999 U.S.-China bilateral agreement affects U.S. firms’ innovation. We show that U.S. firms operating in China decrease their process innovations—innovations that improve firms’ own production methods—following the agreement.
Brand naming challenges are more complex in logographic languages (e.g., Chinese), compared with phonographic languages (e.g., English) because the former languages feature looser correspondence between sound and meaning.
We develop a multi-period theoretical model to characterize the relationship between a publication that ranks universities and prospective attendees -- high school students -- who might view the ranking and use it to help decide which university to attend.
As the middle class shrinks and consumer debt, education and healthcare costs increase, a national conversation has focused on the wealth gap within America and the realities of the American Dream.
Sharecare Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Arnold shared his vision for the future of digital healthcare in the United States as part of the Dean’s Speaker Series on Nov. 8 at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill.
Channels have traditionally been viewed as intermediaries that facilitate the transfer of products from manufacturers to consumers. Innovations in digital technologies help firms to integrate the customer experience across channels and devices. This new phenomenon is referred to as “omnichannel marketing.”
Despite having the deepest and most diverse capital markets in the world, the United States still struggles to provide sufficient capital to many small businesses outside of major commercial centers as well as to women-owned and minority-owned businesses regardless of size or location. This paper reviews the academic literature and provides an analysis of some recent data to gain understanding of the causes of these gaps as well as the solutions for filling the gaps. Results indicate that the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program is an effective mechanism for providing capital to underserved geographies as well as to businesses owned by women and underrepresented minorities.
This workshop, hosted on Friday, Feb. 7, provided students the opportunity to learn from a panel of UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School faculty and students who are currently engaged in business research. The panel included Brad Hendricks, Paige Ouimet, Sreedhari Desai, Angelica Leigh, Ian Kenny and was moderated by Sarah Kenyon, research associate at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.