It is probably not a mystery to even the most casual observer of political affairs why the historic climate, health care and tax bill signed earlier this month was dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act. Inflation is high and causing real problems for many households, and so if only Congress could legislate it away by enacting … This is not to say that the package does not deserve any enthusiasm; it is an impressive legislative feat, making significant, though imperfect, advances on health care and climate change. On the other hand, the effect it will have on inflation, its raison d’être in name, will be modest at best and occur only over time.
Nonwage benefits have become increasingly important and now represent 30% of total compensation (BLS, 2021). Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find dramatically lower within-firm variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits, compared to wages. We argue that this pattern can be a consequence of nondiscrimination regulations and the high administrative burden of managing too many or complex plans
Physicians spend more than 5 hours a day working on Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and more than an hour doing EHR tasks after the end of the workday. In this paper, we investigate how physicians' workflow decisions on when to perform EHR tasks affect: (1) total time on EHR and (2) time spent after work.
Health care costs in the United States make up a larger proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than in any other developed country and continue to rise. We examine whether the use of consistent metrics in costing information systems across hospitals provides one avenue to reduce these costs. We refer to such consistency as “costing information consistency” or CIC and empirically measure it by identifying whether hospitals in a multihospital system share the same costing system vendor. Using M&A activity among vendors as an instrument for exogenous changes in hospital CIC, we find that CIC is associated with a 13.3% reduction in operating expenses, suggesting that increased cost comparability from CIC helps hospitals identify ways to reduce operating expenses by identifying clinical and administrative best practices.
Join the Kenan Institute on Nov. 30 as we partner with Infinia ML to host the Machine Learning Symposium at UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. This event will bring together academic, policy and business leaders to connect the possibilities of cutting-edge research with the realities of practical implementation in enterprise.
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.
Jennifer Blouin, professor of accounting at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, is the Kenan Institute’s newest Senior Faculty Fellow.
Much has been made of presumed profit shifting by U.S.-based multinationals to foreign countries, particularly the ramifications of the practice on the U.S. tax base. In this video, Jennifer Blouin, professor of accounting at The Wharton School, discusses research that shows profit shifting is actually less deleterious to the country’s corporate tax base than is often believed.
Blouin, a member of the Kenan Institute Board of Advisors, told Knowledge at Wharton that proposals to levy a 1% excise tax on corporate share buybacks and a 15% minimum tax on corporations that report more than $1 billion in book profits or in their financial statements were ill-conceived and based on misconceptions of corporate behavior.
Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow Thomas Stith, North Carolina Community College System President Jeff Cox and Capgemini’s Jennifer Paylor discuss workforce skills and the economy.
This April, the UNC Tax Center once again welcomed guests from across the country and around the world to Chapel Hill for our 20th Annual UNC Tax Symposium. The event was a great success, with participants ranging from academic researchers in accounting, finance, law and economics to policymakers and practitioners with an interest in evidence-based tax research.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, two large infrastructure-related bills have been enacted. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law in November 2021, provides funding for a wide range of activities including roads, rail, transit, broadband, water and electrical infrastructure.
New business formation fuels local growth in North Carolina and offers real-time data to guide policy and forecasting, according to new research from the Kenan Institute, the North Carolina Collaboratory, and the Secretary of State.
We find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts, comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies. These differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads, consistent with mispricing. Moreover, the pricing effects are the largest among firms that are the most opaque, likely exacerbating financing constraints.
Tax Reform will have significant financial accounting implications. This event will provide a forum for accountants and economists to share insights from academic research, as well as well as practitioners and corporate tax leaders to share their perspectives from the field.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 significantly changed how business income is taxed. To what extent have these changes affected tax planning decisions and the economy? Join the UNC Tax Center and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center as experts in accounting, taxation and economics offer their perspectives.
On Feb. 8, Peloton Co-founder John Foley announced his plans to step down as CEO and become its executive chairman – but can such a move help or hurt a company’s future? Entrepreneurship Center Faculty Director and UNC Professor Chris Bingham and UNC Kenan-Flagler Ph.D. graduate Travis Howell share their perspectives with NPR Marketplace.
Combining the perspectives of practicing physicians, organized medicine, and competition policy, the writers review the challenges and benefits of price transparency, including the recent executive order and associated rulemaking directing providers to disclose negotiated and out-of-pocket costs for “shoppable” healthcare services.
Join the UNC Tax Center and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center as experts in accounting, taxation and economics offer their perspectives.
From small towns to big cities and everywhere in between, there is still a long road ahead to address the current economic crisis spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and adapt to the new normal, but NCGrowth and SmartUp have been hosting webinars to provide communities with key resources. On Wednesday, May 20, three panelists offered their perspectives to explore the economic impacts of COVID-19.