Scholars have traditionally treated motivation as a value-neutral state divorced from normative considerations. Yet, research across the social sciences suggests a growing moral imperative to love work, which carries with it the social expectation of intrinsic motivation.
Intersectionality has emerged as an important theoretical concept for examining intersecting social hierarchies and has garnered varying interpretations and applications in scholarly discourse. To help organize varied definitions of intersectionality that are commonly used in the social sciences, we propose a typology that distinguishes between primary, pragmatic, and pluralistic intersectionality.
We find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts, comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies. These differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads, consistent with mispricing. Moreover, the pricing effects are the largest among firms that are the most opaque, likely exacerbating financing constraints.
Using 391 high-skilled firm entries in the U.S. from 1990–2010, we estimate the effects of the firm entry on incumbent residents’ consumption, finances, and mobility. We compare outcomes for residents living close to the entry location with those living far away while controlling for their proximity to potential high-skilled firm entry sites.
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.
The Black Communities Conference, a.k.a. #BlackCom2019, is a vibrant and uniquely important gathering featuring panel discussions, local tours, film screenings, workshops, keynotes and more. Our core mission is to foster collaboration among Black communities and universities for the purpose of enhancing Black community life and furthering the understanding of Black communities. Black Communities: A Conference for Collaboration is co-hosted by the Institute of African American Research and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
The benefits of internal labor markets are largest when they include industries that utilize similar worker skills, facilitating cross-industry worker reallocation and collaboration. We show that diversifying acquisitions occur more frequently among industry pairs with higher human capital transferability. Such acquisitions result in larger labor productivity gains and are less often undone in subsequent divestitures.
Voice, or the expression of work-related suggestions or opinions, can help teams access and utilize members’ privately held knowledge and skills and improve collective outcomes. However, recent research has suggested that sometimes, rather than encourage positive outcomes for teams, voice from members can have detrimental consequences.
On Thursday, Sept. 6, the Kenan Institute welcomed new UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School faculty with an interdisciplinary seminar and dinner at the Kenan Center. Dean Doug Shackelford, Kenan Institute Director Greg Brown and others spoke about opportunities for Kenan-Flagler faculty to get involved with the mission of the institute.
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.
Five of the top 10 skills identified for business success are entrepreneurial skills, making entrepreneurship education relevant not just for would-be startup owners, but for general business students as well.
We all know that North Carolina is a migration magnet. But just who’s moving into – and out of – the state? And what’s the impact on North Carolina’s economy and infrastructure? Jim Johnson, director of education, aging and economic development initiatives for the Kenan Institute, and Allan Parnell, vice president of the Cedar Institute for Sustainable Communities in Mebane, NC, go in search of answers.
Life financial outcomes carry a significant heritable component, but the mechanisms by which genes influence financial choices remain unclear. Focusing on a polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), we found that individuals possessing the short allele of this gene invested less in equities, were less engaged in actively making investment decisions, and had fewer credit lines.
A July 2020 analysis conducted by the Urban Institute estimated states would lose $200 billion in tax revenue through the June 2021 fiscal period due to COVID-19. How states manage this shortfall will impact individuals and businesses. In partnership with the AICPA, our expert panel will share the latest revenue projections and provide insight into actions states are and will be taking to increase revenue.
Federal, state and local governments acted quickly to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, because the category of “small business” is defined so broadly, stimulus money did not always reach the intended recipients. The government’s definition of small business includes firms with fewer than 500 employees — which, taken together, represent a broad collection of different types of businesses with very different needs.
We study price optimization under the mixture of boundary logit (MBL) model, which was recently introduced in Jagabathula et al. (2020) and Jagabathula and Venkataraman (2022). We show that the pricing problem under the MBL model is hard to solve in the most general case. However, we prove structural results for the general pricing problem and characterize the optimal solution for several special cases, including a setting in which all products are charged the same price, and a setting with two products.
North Carolina’s phenomenal migration-driven population growth masks a troubling trend: high rates of death and dying prematurely which, left unchecked, can potentially derail the state’s economic growth and prosperity in the years ahead. On average, 246 North Carolinians died each day during the 2010s, increasing to 317 daily between April 1, 2020 and July 1, 2022. COVID-19 and the substance abuse crisis have played a major role in premature deaths of prime working age citizens of the state. Both people-based and place-based strategies and interventions are urgently needed to address the state’s death crisis.
Despite having the deepest and most diverse capital markets in the world, the United States still struggles to provide sufficient capital to many small businesses outside of major commercial centers as well as to women-owned and minority-owned businesses regardless of size or location. This paper reviews the academic literature and provides an analysis of some recent data to gain understanding of the causes of these gaps as well as the solutions for filling the gaps. Results indicate that the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program is an effective mechanism for providing capital to underserved geographies as well as to businesses owned by women and underrepresented minorities.
This paper provides the first large-sample analysis of buyout and venture capital fund values over their lifetimes. Specifically, we examine interim fund investment multiples (TVPIs), internal rates of return (IRRs), and direct-alphas based on the current reported net asset values (NAVs) at each quarter of a fund’s life.
We estimate the causal effects of employee-friendly scheduling practices on store financial performance at the US retailer Gap, Inc. The randomized field experiment evaluated a multi-component intervention designed to improve dimensions of work schedules – inconsistency, unpredictability, inadequacy, and lack-of-employee control – shown to undermine employee well-being and productivity.