Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professor of Economics, University of Maryland, and 2023 Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow
The list of stores that have closed or gone bankrupt in 2020 reads like a “who’s who” of venerable retail giants. Although retailing has been experiencing tectonic shifts for several years, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated both challenges and opportunities. In this Kenan Insight, we explore four major trends in retail, with a particular focus on food retailing.
As federal, state and local governments struggle to reopen the economy as the COVID-19 pandemic surges onward, efforts to ensure people’s health and safety are seemingly at odds with attempts to spur economic activity. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how a data-driven approach to reopening North Carolina (and the U.S. as a whole) can help preserve both lives and livelihoods.
In this paper we examine the prevalence of data, specification, and parameter uncertainty in the formation of simple rules that mimic monetary policymaking decisions. Our approach is to build real-time data sets and simulate a real-time policy-setting environment in which we assume that policy is captured by movements in the actual federal funds rate, and then to assess what sorts of policy rule models and what sorts of data best explain what the Federal Reserve actually did.
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.
This paper surveys the recent advances in machine learning method for economic forecasting. The survey covers the following topics: nowcasting, textual data, panel and tensor data, high-dimensional Granger causality tests, time series cross-validation, classification with economic losses.
UNC’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Duke University Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) initiative have embarked on a joint initiative to build a data repository to facilitate empirical research in entrepreneurship.
Public health surveillance systems routinely process massive volumes of data to identify health adverse events affecting the general population. Surveillance and response to foodborne disease suffers from a number of systemic and other delays that hinder early detection and confirmation of emerging contamination situations. In this paper we develop an answer set programming (ASP) application to assist public health officials in detecting an emerging foodborne disease outbreak by integrating and analyzing in near real-time temporally, spatially and symptomatically diverse data. These data can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting systems from regulatory agencies. We encode geographic ontologies in ASP to infer spatial relationships that may not be evident using traditional statistical tools. These technologies and ontologies have been implemented in a new informatics tool, the North Carolina Foodborne Events Data Integration and Analysis Tool (NCFEDA). The application was built to demonstrate the potential of situational awareness—created through real-time data fusion, analytics, visualization, and real-time communication—to reduce latency of response to foodborne disease outbreaks by North Carolina public health personnel.
Reliably detecting insider trading is a major impediment to both research and regulatory practice. Using account-level transaction data, we propose a novel approach. Specifically, after extracting several key empirical features of typical insider trading cases from existing regulatory actions, we then employ a machine learning methodology to identify suspicious insiders across our full sample.
Entrepreneurship is encoded in the DNA of Rebecca White, director of the Entrepreneurship Center at The University of Tampa where she is James W. Walter Distinguished Chair of Entrepreneurship. She is currently a Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University.
Small businesses are an undeniable engine of growth for the United States, comprising 99 percent of all U.S. firms and driving nearly half our total economic activity. Yet small business owners across the country lack sufficient capital to succeed, grow and scale. The Kenan Institute has conducted a new analysis on the role of the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program in providing capital to the often-overlooked small businesses operating outside of metropolitan centers, as well as those owned by women and underrepresented minorities. You can access an overview of our findings, as well as key takeaways for business and policy leaders, by clicking below.
In response to the economic chaos caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government launched its largest fiscal stimulus in modern history—the CARES Act. But with $2 trillion invested in small businesses, unemployment benefits and direct cash payments to households, the CARES Act has still fallen short of its goals to spur consumer spending and restore employment. This Kenan Insight analyzes what went wrong, and offers suggestions for the anticipated next round of federal economic aid.
This article introduces a new data enrichment method that combines revealed data on consumer demand and competitive reactions with stated data on competitive reactions to yet-to-be-enacted, unprecedented marketing policy changes. The authors extend the data enrichment literature to include stated competitive reactions, collected from subject-matter experts through a conjoint experiment.
A new, data-driven method of looking at regional economies in more detail will enable a richer discussion of the U.S. economy as a whole and provide forecasts for decision-makers in business and government.
AI. CRISPR. mRNA. Key components of the rapidly expanding alphabet soup of technologies driving a boom in healthcare innovation. In this Kenan Insight, we explore why the 2021 Trends in Entrepreneurship Report names emerging technology in the healthcare industry as a key trend, along with some of the challenges that come with fast-moving technological advancements.
New Kenan Institute Research Economist Sarah Dickerson says that while her research and writing will help further the institute’s mission, "I also aim to expand the mission’s scope by reframing some of the fundamental questions being asked."
2020 brought an end to North Carolina’s decade-long economic expansion that began in 2010 after the Great Recession. It has now been a year since COVID-19 arrived on U.S. shores, and we can see some changes clearly, while others are just starting to emerge from the haze. It will likely be years before we fully grasp the myriad ways COVID-19 has affected the nation’s and the state’s economies. Now seems like a good time to take stock of the fallout from 2020, the trends we’re seeing a year into the crisis and where things are starting to turn around for North Carolina.
Join the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and SAS this November for the AI Innovations Forum, where thought leaders from academia, industry and government will convene to discuss and debate the most challenging issues in artificial intelligence today, setting the agenda for future research and policy.
How will sweeping changes in primary care services and providers affect the primary care workforce? We examine this question as well as how well the increasing demand for these services can be met in the future.