This paper studies the emergence of debt financing by private equity funds. Using confidential data on U.S. buyout funds, we document the increasing use of subscription lines of credit (SLCs) as an additional source of capital.
On Saturday, March 21, the Small Business Investor Alliance released a survey focusing on the effect COVID-19 is having on small businesses across the U.S. Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown and UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Ph.D. candidate Matteo Binfarè provided data analysis.
In December 2019, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Center for the Business of Health (CBOH) began a research partnership with Sharecare, a leading digital health company founded by technology entrepreneur, Jeff Arnold, to assess the economic value of changing various health behaviors via mobile health (mHealth) interventions.
This paper examines how US immigration-induced labor mobility frictions affect entrepreneurship and firm monopsony. I exploit a natural experiment in the US immigration system that unexpectedly increased Green Card (GC) related job-switching frictions for Indian and Chinese immigrants in October 2005. Using matched employee-employer data from LinkedIn, I confirm that this shock reduced inter-firm employee mobility for Indian and Chinese employees.
There has been renewed advocacy for restrictions on international financial flows in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Motivated by this trend, we explore the extent to which cross-border flows affect real economic activity. Unlike previous research efforts that focus on aggregated capital flows, we exploit novel data on forced trading by global mutual funds as a plausible source of exogenous flow shocks. Such forced trading is known to generate large liquidity and price effects, but its real impacts have not been studied extensively. We find that both country- and firm-level investment growth rates are significantly affected by these exogenous capital shocks, and that their effect is more pronounced for firms whose marginal investment decisions are more equity-reliant.
This paper examines the spillover effects of U.S. unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on emerging market capital flows and asset prices. Affine term structure model estimates show that U.S. monetary policy shocks, identified with high-frequency Treasury futures data, represent revisions to expected short-term yields and term premia, especially during the UMP period. The policy shocks exhibit sizable effects on U.S. holdings of emerging market assets. These effects disproportionately manifest through valuation changes versus physical flows, are more pronounced for equity relative to bond markets, and are asymmetric between the quantitative easing and tapering periods, with flows more important during the unwinding.
Using confidential offer-level data on the US housing market, this paper examines the rounding-off heuristics in the bilateral bargaining process. We demonstrate that home sellers and home buyers follow different rounding-off heuristics. While sellers' list prices cluster more frequently around charm numbers (e.g. 349,999), buyers' offer prices and negotiated final sales prices cluster at salient round numbers.
Factor analysis is a widely used tool to summarize high dimensional panel data via a small dimensional set of latent factors. Applications, particularly in finance, are often focused on observable factors with an economic interpretation. The objective of this paper is to provide a formal test for the question whether the factor spaces of latent and observable (economic) factors are equal.
A replication study assesses whether the results of a particular prior study can be reproduced, including in new contexts with different data. Replication studies are critical for building a cumulative body of research knowledge.
We show that stock returns follow predictable patterns before the publication of anomaly trading signals. Moreover, anomaly trading signals derived from financial data are themselves predictable, making it possible to trade before financial statements are released. A trading strategy based on predicted signals earns an annualized return of 3.65% in the quarter before the signal is released.
Healthcare services provided to patients with similar health conditions are known to vary. Standardization of healthcare delivery is a relatively new, yet hotly debated approach to address clinical variations. Previous research on process standardization in health services has focused on measuring adherence to established protocols that are available only for a limited set of disease states. We create an alternate construct that quantifies process standardization measured in terms of consistency of services rendered, and apply it to the healthcare setting using detailed nonpublic inpatient discharge data from about 35 million inpatient stays at 296 acute care hospitals in California between 2008-2016.
We coin the term credit market fluidity to describe the intensity of credit reallocation, whose properties and implications we study within the commercial loan market in France over the period 1998 through 2018. We base our analysis on credit register data and thus provide a more complete account of gross credit flows across and within bank loan portfolios.
Using unique data on employee ownership plans sponsored by U.S. public companies, we find that large negative market shocks lead to active changes in portfolio choices among inexperienced and previously inattentive investors. We use employee ownership plans to identify a set of inexperienced investors who did not actively select to participate in the market and who are confronted with a difficult financial decision.
Focusing on data from the United States and the United Kingdom, we document that both the anomaly identified by Backus and Smith, which concerns the low correlation between consumption differentials and exchange rates, and the forward premium anomaly, which concerns the tendency of high interest rate currencies to appreciate, have become more severe over time.
Using firm-level administrative tax data, we document dramatic reductions in private leverage since the Global Financial Crisis, while leverage among public firms rose during this period. Our findings suggest that banks' credit supply plays a prominent role in explaining the leverage pattern of private firms.
Brick-and-mortar (B&M) retailers must enhance the customer in-store experience to better compete with online retailers. Fitting rooms in B&M stores play a critical role in the customer experience as a venue to experience products and examine alternatives. High traffic in fitting rooms, however, obstructs the customer’s ability to choose a product. In this paper, we (1) examine the impact of fitting room traffic on store performance using archival data, (2) identify phantom stockouts as a plausible mechanism for this impact, and (3) provide a potential solution and quantify the magnitude of its impact using two field experiments.
Research on resource dependence typically takes a static view in which actions and outcomes are determined structurally, but not as responses to the actions of the counterparty in an exchange relation. By contrast, this study addresses a question of power dynamics by examining whether mergers of organizations trigger responses from their common exchange partners. We predict that common exchange partners respond by withdrawing from the relationship and that their responses vary with the availability of alternatives, the value of the relationship, and the relationship history. Using data on advertising agencies, we show that mergers of agencies do trigger reactions from their common clients, and the reactions differ with agency and client characteristics. Extending existing theory and evidence, our results suggest that firms respond to the dynamics of exchange relationships and not only to their structure.
In a series of very influential studies, McKinsey (2015; 2018; 2020; 2023) reports finding statistically significant positive relations between the industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margins of global McKinsey-chosen sets of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019.
Work scheduling research typically prescribes task sequences implemented by managers. Yet employees often have discretion to deviate from their prescribed sequence. Using data from 2.4 million radiological diagnoses, we find that doctors prioritize similar tasks (batching) and those tasks they expect to complete faster (shortest expected processing time).
Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) loans allow homeowners to fund investments in green residential projects through property tax payments. We assess the housing market effects of PACE using novel loan-level data from Florida merged to property transaction, tax, and permitting records.