The 2017 Workshop on North Carolina Manufacturing Data Science targets a critical gap in the emerging digital manufacturing ecosystem – achieving data-driven improvements in manufacturing processes to realize broader benefits across the factory and enterprise. It will bring together personnel from North Carolina industry, state government, University of North Carolina (UNC) General Administration, and UNC system universities to discuss current capabilities and future needs for widespread implementation.
The North Carolina Community College System is faced with a major dilemma: how to reduce the time to degree and increase the community colleges’ success or graduation rates, which system-wide now stands at 30% in four years. This research was designed to gain qualitative insights from a sample of recent graduates, that is, students who managed to graduate in four or fewer years, on critical success factors. From the standpoint of strategy development, we assert that building on success may be more productive than focusing on deficits in improving community college completion rates.
While much research indicates that organizational processes are learned from experiences, surprisingly little is known about what is actually learned. Using a novel method to measure explicit learning, we track the learned content of six technology-based ventures from three diverse countries as they internationalize. The emergent theoretical framework indicates that firms learn heuristics. These heuristics have a common structure centered on opportunity capture and are learned in a specific developmental order. This results in a deliberately small, yet increasingly strategic, portfolio of heuristics. Broadly, we contribute to the psychological foundations of strategy by highlighting the rationality of heuristics as strategy, capability creation as the cognitive transition from novice to expert heuristics, and simplification cycling as a critical dynamic capability for sustaining competitive advantage.
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.
Academics, politicians, and journalists are often highly critical of U.S. firms for holding too much cash. Cash holdings are stockpiled free-cash flow and incur substantial opportunity costs from the perspectives of economics. However, behavioral theory highlights the benefits of cash holdings as fungible slack resources facilitating adaptive advantages.
Given uncertain popularity of new products by location, fast fashion retailer Zara faces a trade-off. Large initial shipments to stores reduce lost sales in the critical first days of the product life cycle, but maintaining stock at the warehouse allows restocking flexibility once initial sales are observed.
Consider two buyers facing uncertain demands who need to purchase a common critical component from a powerful sole-source supplier. If the two buyers pool their demands and purchase from the supplier as a single entity, will they necessarily earn higher profits than purchasing separately?
We examine realized spreads and price impact in clock and trade time following each trade in all common stocks from 2010 to 2017. The term structure of realized spreads (price impact) is sharply downward (upward) sloping, implying that (a) market maker profitability is sensitive to speed, and (b) the choice of the horizon of measurement is critical when drawing inferences from spread decompositions.
Self-presentation is a fundamental aspect of social life, with myriad critical outcomes dependent on others’ impressions. We identify and offer the first empirical investigation of a prevalent, yet understudied self-presentation strategy: humblebragging. Across seven studies including a week-long diary study and a field experiment, we identify humblebragging — bragging masked by a complaint or humility — as a common, conceptually distinct, and ineffective form of self-presentation.
Conventional wisdom touts tax breaks and other economic incentives as the key to attracting out-of-state business. But do educational policies play an even bigger role? In a recent article in The New Republic, Brent Lane, economic strategist for the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, says a well-educated workforce is essential, and not just for winning business bids.
This paper develops a dynamic rational expectations model of the credit rating process, incorporating three critical elements of this industry: (i) the rating agencies' ability to misreport the issuer's credit quality, (ii) their ability to issue unsolicited ratings, and (iii) their reputational concerns.
The multigenerational survival rate for family-owned businesses is not good. Lack of a shared vision for the family enterprise and weak next-generation leadership are often cited as two of the leading reasons for the failure of family firms to successfully transition from one generation of family ownership to the next. The climate of the business-owning family has also been suggested as important to the performance of the family enterprise. Despite these commonly held tenets, there is a lack of rigorous quantitative research that explores the relationships among these three factors.
Kenan Scholar Laura Gerlach (BSBA '20) reflects on her experience with the Kenan Scholars Board of Mentors.
From romance to finance and from the media to markets, data can help answer questions faster and provide critical insights to make smarter decisions. Data is power. Knowing how to read data can help identify patterns to end labor trafficking or to provide more affordable housing. Analyzing peaks and troughs can lead to game changing technological breakthroughs and new business opportunities. In the current error of ‘fake news’, how confident are you in your ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data and assess facts? Join us at this interactive session and learn just how data literate you are.
While technological advances have traditionally been a boon to the U.S. economy, the rapid rise of new platforms and the increased financialization of the economy in recent years have encouraged the growth of monopolies—driving an ever-widening geographic gap in the distribution of income across the country. New research from the Kenan Institute’s Professor Maryann Feldman explores the ramifications of this growing divide.
Commercial real estate is a major asset class, with an estimated value of more than $12 trillion in the U.S. alone. But the stay-at-home orders and business closures precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to negatively – and disastrously – affect commercial properties. What will the short- and long-term impacts be, which types of properties will be hardest hit and what policies can be put in place to help stem the tide of losses? UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor and Leonard W. Wood Center for Real Estate Studies Faculty Advisor Andra Ghent and her colleagues examine these issues in this week’s Kenan Insight.
The Peak Performance simulation is an experiential learning process designed to help learners and medical professionals develop communication and interpersonal skills that are critical in today’s health care settings. The skills practiced in this simulation have a direct impact on our interactions with patients, how we work with colleagues, and our capacity to lead others.
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.
In a recent episode of his award-winning show, “United Shades of America,” W. Kamau Bell interviews a Black man about systemic racism in America who said, “This country is not designed for us and, in fact, is designed against us.” As an African American, this observation triggered three critical questions.
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a significant shift in how and where we work, play and live. In this Kenan Insight, we explore which changes will be temporary and which are here to stay.