The healthcare industry experienced massive disruption in 2020 and continues to face unprecedented times. Persistent challenges presented by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have forced organizations to rethink their existing practices as well as how they intend to operate in future. Now more than ever, healthcare leaders need to exercise flexibility and be equipped with the right tools and ideas to lead the next generation of health.
Small-business owners say they’re just beginning to recover from the sudden blow that hobbled many of them during the early 2020 pandemic restrictions. Now mixed economic messages have them wondering what to do next, according to a Washington Post story. “There is so much that’s up in the air, and uncertainty affects small businesses much more so than it does larger ones,” said institute Director of Research Paige Ouimet.
Stephen Arbogast, Director of the Energy Center at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, offers an in-depth explanation of supply dynamics in global energy markets--and why oil and gas prices have been so chaotic.
Join our panel of experts who will share their technological, legal and social expertise to answer the questions raised by the real-world performance of risk assessment instruments.
While access and quality of healthcare in the U.S. are shaped by several factors—location, work, insurance—a simple change can make a big difference for patients. According to a new study led by the institute-affiliated Center for the Business of Health Faculty Director Brad Staats, delivering mental and physical care at the same location can improve patient experience and care efficiency. This week’s Kenan Insight offers a chance for our experts to explore the findings of this new study.
Hydrocarbon derived from fast pyrolysis of plantation wood is a potential feedstock for the production of transportation fuels. Unfortunately, the cost to produce and upgrade this feedstock is highly uncertain, and its current technological state is not competitive with crude oil. Additional R&D will be needed to achieve the significant cost reductions required for competitiveness. Significant technical hurdles must be overcome to achieve a commercially ready, cost competitive technology. This paper identifies the most promising areas for the needed future research.
This paper argues that the seemingly lower returns on distressed stocks are partly the result of estimation bias and proposes an exact theoretical correction that can be applied in practice.
Financial regulators and investors have expressed concerns about high pay inequality within firms. Using a proprietary data set of public and private firms, this paper shows that firms with higher pay inequality—relative wage differentials between top- and bottom-level jobs—are larger and have higher valuations and stronger operating performance. Moreover, firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns and greater earnings surprises, suggesting that pay inequality is not fully priced by the market. Our results support the notion that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection of differences in managerial talent.
Although weather has been shown to affect financial markets and financial decision making, a still open question is the channel through which such influence is exerted. By employing a multiple price list method, this paper provides direct experimental evidence that sunshine and good weather promote risk-taking behavior.
Linguistic features of a firm’s regulatory filings, taken at face value, convey valuable information about the firm. In this paper, we examine whether a manager-specific, non-economic component also exists within these filings and whether investors consider this component when assessing firm value. To do so, we build on prior research that shows founders have unique personality attributes, including excessive optimism.
In this paper we investigate the effect of offshore supply dependence (OSD) on offshoring–reshoring profit comparisons. We find that OSD hampers a reshoring manufacturer’s responsiveness to demand information updates and may significantly affect offshoring–reshoring comparisons, such that reshoring may yield lower profits than offshoring in many cases, including when offshoring has no baseline-cost advantage.
Competing technologies in emerging industries create uncertainties that discourage supplier investments. Open technology can induce supplier investments, but may also lead to intensified future competition. In this paper, we study competing manufacturers’ open-technology strategies. We show that despite the risk of intensifying future competition, open technologies by competing manufacturers may constitute an equilibrium and can indeed induce supplier investments.
This paper examines the impact of real estate prices on firm capital structure decisions. For a typical US listed company, a one standard deviation increase in predicted value of firm pledgeable collateral translates into a 3 percentage points increase in firm market leverage ratio.
This paper examines how the international demand for luxury consumption affects the real estate market in global hotspots.
Economic recoveries can be slow, fast, or involve double dips. This paper provides an explanation based on the dynamic interactions between bank lending standards and firm entry selection. In the model, bank lending standards refer to both how banks screen borrowers with unknown quality and whether well-qualified borrowers are credit rationed, and firm entry selection refers to the mechanism through which financing conditions select firms of different quality to enter the lending market.
This paper examines how tax uncertainty created by highly aggressive tax planning affects a firm's investment decisions. The tax uncertainty that we study arises from tax choices of such inadequate merit that the firms themselves believe that they will lose if audited. Consistent with a simple model that we develop, we find that investments in fixed assets and research and development are increasing, at a decreasing rate, in the tax savings from these aggressive plans.
This paper investigates changes in firm spending following changes in shareholder taxes. We show that firms with less elastic demand for equity capital will expand operations less than other firms following shareholder tax cuts. Since financial constraint is a factor that diminishes a firms demand elasticity for capital, we predict that financially constrained firms expand less than other companies following shareholder tax reductions.
In this paper, we examine the relationship between inventory levels and one-year-ahead earnings of retailers using publicly available financial data. We use benchmarking metrics obtained from operations management literature to demonstrate an inverted-U relationship between abnormal inventory growth and one-year-ahead earnings per share for retailers.
In this paper we argue that task design affects rule breaking in the workplace. Specifically, we propose that task variety activates deliberative (Type 2) processes as opposed to automatic/intuitive (Type 1) processes, which, in turn, helps prevent individuals from breaking rules in order to serve their own hedonic self-interest.