The NCFOODSAFE project bridges existing gaps in current North Carolina food safety systems by developing a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis (NCFEDA) tool, that provides situational awareness and intelligence about an intrinsically complex and dynamic process—the detection of and response to a foodborne disease outbreak. The project is informed by an understanding of the information sharing and communication structures among government agencies and other personnel responsible for regulating and overseeing the state’s food safety system.
In the past decade, coworking spaces have emerged as a new and promising phenomenon within entrepreneurship. Due to its prevalence, popularity and potential for disruptive change, coworking is increasingly relevant to theory, practice and policy in entrepreneurship, yet its implications are largely unstudied given its rapid rise. Overall, more data and analysis is needed to inform owners, policy makers and entrepreneurs about the effects of coworking. This paper is meant to increase understanding about the nature and value of this new phenomenon. In other words, it attempts to address the question: Does coworking work?
Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that the wealthier have better life and property insurance coverage.
We empirically investigate the effect of uncertainty on corporate hiring. Using novel data from the labor market for MBA graduates, we show that uncertainty regarding how well job candidates fit with a firm’s industry hinders hiring and that firms value probationary work arrangements that provide the option to learn more about potential full-time employees.
The Small Business Investor Alliance surveyed the small business portfolios of Small Business Investment Companies to measure the impact the pandemic is having on their operations and employment. Small businesses are facing extreme cash flow concerns. Small businesses are already laying off a substantial number of employees and without a significant change in trajectory, layoffs are anticipated to increase tremendously. Data analysis provided by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
We model a dynamic economy with strategic complementarity among investors and government interventions that mitigate coordination failures. We establish equilibrium existence and uniqueness, and show that one intervention can affect subsequent interventions through altering public information structures. Our results suggest that optimal policy should emphasize initial interventions because coordination outcomes tend to correlate. Neglecting informational externalities of initial interventions results in over- or under-interventions.
We use US Census administrative data to document important facts about wages at entrepreneurial firms. As in earlier studies, we confirm lower average wages at new firms. However, nearly two thirds of this decline can be attributed to differences in worker quality at new firms. Moreover, once we control for firm fixed effects, absorbing time invariant firm quality, the wage difference between new and established firms further declines.
This research utilizes data from the World Bank Investment Climate Survey to examine the use of external capital for almost 70,000 small and medium-sized firms in 103 developing and developed countries.
In a recent paper, “Demystifying Illiquid Assets – Expected Returns for Private Equity,” Ilmanen, Chandra and McQuinn (of AQR) give a perspective on the past, present, and expected future performance of private equity. They conclude that “private equity does not seem to offer as attractive a net-of-fee return edge over public market counterparts as it did 15-20 years ago from either a historical or forward-looking perspective.” This analysis provides our perspective based on more recent and, we think, more reliable data and performance measures – the historical perspective is more positive than Ilmanen et al. portray.
Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that those with more wealth have better life and property insurance coverage, controlling for the value of the assets insured.
To encourage year-long engagement and invite more people into the conversation, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Entrepreneurship Center at UNC have produced the first-ever Trends in Entrepreneurship Report. Combining data with expert analysis, the report gives timely insights into the topics that significantly affect entrepreneurs, funders, ecosystem partners, policymakers and others in the innovation economy.
The Trends in Entrepreneurship Report brings together expertise and data from academia, industry and policy to highlight relevant topics facing entrepreneurs and investors today. For the 2022 annual report, we invited researchers to submit trends based on their own emerging research. We welcomed submissions related to current topics in entrepreneurship, with a particular interest on trends related to funding; ecosystems; teams and talent; emerging technologies; and addressing diversity, equity and inclusion in entrepreneurship and small business. Each trend was reviewed for quality and relevance by our editorial board
We examine the relationship between MIDAS regressions and the estimation of state space models applied to mixed frequency data. While in some cases the binding function is known, in general it is not, and therefore indirect inference is called for. The approach is appealing when we consider state space models which feature stochastic volatility, or other non-Gaussian and nonlinear settings where maximum likelihood methods require computationally demanding approximate filters.
We evaluate the performance of two popular systemic risk measures, CoVaR and SRISK, during eight financial panics in the era before FDIC insurance. Bank stock price and balance sheet data were not readily available for this time period. We rectify this shortcoming by constructing a novel dataset for the New York banking system before 1933.
We use data from a federally sponsored survey about teenagers' marijuana consumption in the United States. We find that, teenagers under predict future marijuana use and that this inaccuracy is moderated by the extent of use. We also find that misprediction is affected by both attitudes and the situation through main and interaction effects. We outline some policy implications of our findings.
Time series are demeaned when sample autocorrelation functions are computed. By the same logic it would seem appealing to remove seasonal means from seasonal time series before computing sample autocorrelation functions. Yet, standard practice is only to remove the overall mean and ignore the possibility of seasonal mean shifts in the data.
We propose a class of two factor dynamic models for duration data and related risk analysis in finance and insurance. Empirical findings suggest that the conditional mean and (under) overdispersion of times elapsed between stock trades feature various patterns of temporal dependence.
Using U.S. venture capital investment data from 1985 to 2008 and qualitative interviews, we examine how group dynamics influence the growth of interorganizational collaborations through the addition of new members.
Using a novel data set from 75 stores of a department store retail chain that changed its incentive plan for store managers to spur greater cooperation among them and with the corporate office, we examine how incentives impact operational decisions and, consequently, store outcomes.
In recent months, mechanisms that have allowed for high-skilled foreign nationals to study and work in the U.S. have been put on the policy chopping block. In this Kenan Insight, we discuss why high-skilled foreign workers are critical to America's economic health, and why policies must continue to support their entry into the U.S.