With more business leaders than ever before embracing stakeholder capitalism – or the belief that companies should work to benefit all stakeholders, not just shareholders – myriad questions have arisen about the concept’s viability and potential for impact. The Kenan Institute has been working to respond, and today we are excited to launch a new series exploring the most pressing issues surrounding stakeholder capitalism. Kicking off the series is this week’s Kenan Insight, which takes a deeper dive into the buzzed-about world of ESG investing. We hope you’ll check it out, and look forward to engaging with you on this topic and others throughout the series!
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Finance Professor and Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Scholar Camelia Kuhnen has been named director of research for the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
Professor Paige Ouimet has been named executive director of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School effective Aug. 21. She succeeds Professor Greg Brown, who led the institute’s growth for eight years.
Female involvement in the workforce remains important to the U.S. economy, but COVID-19 has only exacerbated a drop in participation rates. To reverse the trend, businesses are enhancing maternity leave, child care services and access to fertility and family-planning services, according to research by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School experts.
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.
The enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) on Dec. 22, 2017 dropped the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, creating the prospect of substantially improved cash flows for many U.S. companies. While the effects of this tax cut are still working their way through the economy, it’s not too early to ask an important question: where did (or will) the money go?
The widespread adoption of technological advances has made the move to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic a success. In this Kenan Insight, we look at why the switch was such a win, its impact on worker productivity, and what it means in the long term for workers, office spaces and cities.
The explosive growth in ESG investing has created confusion among investors. As part of our yearlong series on stakeholder capitalism, we unpack what they should expect from ESG and try to reconcile it with both financial theory and empirical evidence. The bottom line is a bit complicated.
Real Estate investments continue to rise in importance in the alternative asset space. But much is still to be learned about their value and performance.
More than ever, businesses are tasked with pleasing both shareholders and stakeholders, including employees, customers and even communities. But can it be done? In this week's Kenan Insight, our experts explore the most successful strategies employed by a class of businesses that have been navigating this debate for generations: family firms.
Higher education is in crisis and its leaders are handicapped by a lack of reliable data. We are entering an era that will require more informed decision making in higher education and unfortunately the underlying data, especially benchmarking performance information, do not exist to support such strategic thinking and change.
In this paper we present a framework for linking smart products (with embedded real-time diagnostics and prognostics based health management capabilities) to a service provisioning system to create a system of ―self-aware product-centric systems. The framework includes a powerful ―learning engine capable of monitoring, analyzing and interpreting patterns of system/product behavior in real-time. The learning engine provides the capability of information feedback for real-time, ―in-the-loop control. This concept enables the service-provisioning network to provide customer services such as product health management at reduced maintenance costs, improved responsiveness to customer needs during use, and generally more efficient operations.
As the historic 2020 U.S. presidential election draws nearer, voters are taking stock of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on their lives and livelihoods, and demanding that policymakers present their plans for economic recovery. In this Kenan Insight, we look at the major forces reshaping the U.S. economy and offer suggestions for forging an intentional and equitable path forward.
Governors across the United States have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing state-level executive actions to address a range of issues provoked by the crisis. Although it is too early to gauge the long-term effects of the pandemic and states’ responses to it, this Kenan Insight provides a preliminary analysis of actions governors have taken thus far, to help inform policymaking going forward.
What’s best for a local economy—recruiting big, established companies, or nurturing home-grown startups? It’s a question economic developers and researchers have grappled with for decades. In a new white paper and Economic Development Quarterly article, Kenan Institute Senior Faculty Fellow Maryann Feldman and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Nichola Lowe offer a new tack: Try both.
We find modest gains, at best, to pursuing more realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. There is a high degree of time-series correlation in net cash flows even across commitment strategies that allocate capital in a very different manner over time.
Our findings debunk the myth that a ‘continuous improvement culture’ will emerge amongst workers and staff that sustains improvement efforts. The root cause behind backsliding is that sustaining process improvement initiatives involves all levels of the organisation, and that leaders play a pivotal role herein they often neglect. We identify four common failure modes.
On April 25, the Kenan Institute presented UNC students Alex Cooper and Phillippa Owens with the institute’s two highest honors. Cooper received the Rollie Tillman Jr. Outstanding Leadership Award, and Owens was recognized with the Kenan Institute Impact Award. Both awards honor students have made a significant impact on the Kenan Institute and its initiatives and exhibited leadership at UNC and in the broader community.
The makers of a synthetic fiber made from recycled plastic bottles and the co-founder of a venture capital firm that focuses on green sectors are the recipients of the 2018 UNC Sustainability Awards, presented on May 10 at The Carolina Club in Chapel Hill.
Flight delays have been a growing issue and they have reached an all-time high in recent years, with the airlines' on-time performance at its worst level in 2007 since 1995.