The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has prompted governments—as well as public and private organizations—to adopt protective measures to prevent the spread of the virus and to mitigate its effects. Included in these measures are the processing of information on the movement of employees and suppliers, as well as sensitive health data. UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor of Finance Eric Ghysels leads a discussion examining the differences in data protection laws in the United States and in the European Union (EU). The panel addresses questions as to how we should address the trade-offs of personal privacy protections versus issues of public health, how current data protection laws address these issues and what a re-imagining of these regulations might look like moving forward. Panelists include Information Technology Foundation Vice President and Director of ITIF’s Center for Data Innovation Daniel Castro and Head of Technology and Privacy at the European Data Protection Supervisor’s Office Thomas Zerdick.
North Carolina’s 100 counties have experienced an uneven pattern of growth and development over the past decade or so, even during the pandemic, when the state was a magnet for migration. At one end, metropolitan and amenity-rich counties captured most of the growth between April 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021; at the other, 21 counties experienced net out-migration. Given these disparities, the Urban Investment Strategies Center offers an approach using targeted economic development strategies.
This research brief uses data from the 2014-2015 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) migration file to quantify the dividend North Carolina receives from recent movers to the state. We calculate the dividend as the differences in per capita adjusted gross income from those who moved to North Carolina (in-migrants) relative to those who were already living in the state (non-migrants) and relative to those who moved from the state (out-migrants). The dividends from migrants ages 55 and older, especially those settling in eight migration magnet counties (Mecklenburg, Wake, Durham, Buncombe, New Hanover, Brunswick, Cabarrus, and Johnston), are significant. This migration constitutes a strategic opportunity for both business development and job creation in North Carolina communities.
Our national security depends on a safe and secure food supply that is free of contamination, whether unintentional or the result of a terrorist act. In December 2006, Congress and the White House passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), establishing the goal of near-real-time electronic situational awareness to enhance early detection of, rapid response to, and management of public health threats in order to minimize their impact. Meeting this challenge for food safety depends on our ability to collect, interpret, and disseminate electronic information across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. While events such as 9/11 have elevated the need to share critical intelligence related to security threats, these events have also promoted the proliferation of multiple data systems and tools whose lack of interoperability hinders effective intelligence gathering and timely response. Further, most of the public health and food safety informatics work in the United States—from early detection of food-related outbreaks by local and state health departments to confirmation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through “fingerprinting” of pathogenic contaminants—takes place at different local, state, and federal jurisdictional levels. As a result, large gaps exist in our ability to meet the challenge of food safety in the United States with regard to PAHPA.
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.